NASA recently announced that they had discovered an amino acid, glycine, in a comet. This comes two years after the Stardust probe had flown by a comet's tail, collected dust in an aerogel bucket, and parachuted the bucket back to Earth for analysis.

The significance of this discovery, is that amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, and proteins are the workhorses of life. Did this discovery mean that comets have life?

That was the reason for the delay. The scientists wanted to be sure that this particular glycine came from the comet and not, say, from oily fingerprints left by the technicians who assembled the bucket. The first problem was that there was so very little of it. We're talking about less material than a fingerprint, merely the vapor from an impacting dust grain. So the team set up their lab and kept calibrating and testing until they felt they would be sensitive to even that small an amount. Then they carefully took samples of foil from around the site of a dust-grain impact (sort of like looking at the gunpowder stains around a bullet hole) and ran it through their mass spectrometer.

I have a special fondness for mass spectrometers, crediting them for snatching me away from solid-state physics and directing my career into space plasma physics. So I can appreciate the carefulness with which they carried their sample to the instrument, gently heating the surface while flowing noble gases or organic solvents over it and then delicately ionizing the molecules to avoid destroying the organics. It is a tour-de-force, demonstrating a proper reverence for the unique sample of comet dust that they had spent 100's of millions of dollars obtaining, and might never obtain again. And indeed, the isotope of Carbon-13 revealed the glycine to be not from Earth.

On the other hand, they might have spared themselves the anxiety because tons of cometary dust rain down on the earth every year, and when big enough chunks make it through the atmosphere to hit the ground, they are classified as carbonaceous chondritic meteorites.   Unfortunately, rain and water will dissolve these type of meteorites, so unless they are collected immediately, they will vanish. But by good fortune we have about a dozen of them over the past century that were collected immediately. And when we analyze them, they are chock full of glycine, as well as four other amino acids and even two nucleobases, the building blocks of DNA. And just like Stardust, these amino acids are made of extraterrestrial heavy carbon.

So yes, Stardust confirms what carbonaceous chondrites have been telling us, there is extra-terrestrial life.

We've known this for upwards of 40 years, but the two primary counter-arguments that it doesn't represent extraterrestrial life have been: (a) contamination; (b) non-biological origin.

Is it Contamination?
1) All amino acids are chiral, with Left-handed (L) and Right-handed (D) forms. All living organisms are only L-amino. Test-tube chemistry can make amino acids, but lacking a chiral catalyst, they generate equal amounts of L and D called a "racemic" mixture. Given that cosmic rays or heat can break/remake chemical bonds, an originally chiral amino acid will become racemic given enough time. Therefore determining whether cometary amino acids are L, D, or racemic will indicate their source.

Answer: they are noticeably non-racemic, with a bias toward L-amino showing that they are either very old life, and/or mixed with some non-biological racemic amino acids.

2) There are 20 amino acids in life, although many more in the test tube. Not all of them are equally stable, with half-lives from a few thousand years to a few million. As a consequence, dinosaur protein surviving 60 million years is considered a true miracle. But more significantly, the presence or absence of select amino acids can tell you how long it has been since a organism was alive. Think of it as C14 dating for proteins. What do comets show?

Answer: Comets are missing many of the complete 20 amino acids, consistent with a clock of 10-100 million years. This is also consistent with the racemization seen in point 1.

3) All life on Earth is recycling CO2 from the atmosphere. The oceans dissolve a lot of CO2 as well as recycle old carbonates, so they represent an older atmosphere. The two stable isotopes of carbon are C12 and C13. Because C13 in methane or CO2 makes it noticeably heavier, C13 settles out of the atmosphere more readily and eventually disappears from the life cycle. So all recent life shows an enhancement of C12 over C13, whose normalized ratio is called by mass spectroscopists "dell-13". Dell-13 for terrestrial organisms runs from -30 to 0, with plants near -30, people near -10, and marine organisms near 0 (which is how they caught Floyd Landis doping on artificial testosterone). What do comets show?

Dell-13 for amino acids recovered from meteorites are above +35, very heavy carbon. Nothing even remotely terrestrial has those numbers. See the articles in this book.

At the Astrobiology conference this year (SPIE publication coming in about 1 month), two necleobases (A&T?) found in carbonaceous chondrites were described (original discovery published in 1970's) whose dell-13 was also +35.

Conclusion: from (1) we know that these amino acids were made by living organisms. From (3) we know that when they were alive they munched on "heavy" carbon not found in the Earth ecosystem. From (2)+(3) we know that they were alive a long, long time ago. Therefore it is not consistent with recent Earth contamination, nor with ancient abiotic contamination, but only with ancient life.

But is it a Comet?

I suppose there is a sliver of an argument that carbonaceous chondrites aren't comets, but if they aren't then we have lots more problems. Consider:

a) They arrived like all meteorites, from extraterrestrial material hitting the earth

b) The parent bodies of most meteorites are known, from stony to nickel-iron asteroids, by matching their reflectance signature. The parent bodies of carbonaceous chondrites match the spectra from the 3 or 4 comet flybys, as well as some recent Hubble measurements. (Dark black objects are hard to see, especially when surrounded by a glowing ball of evaporating gasses, hence the very recent measurements.)

c) An asteroid that has water on it, must produce a tail if it is within the orbit of Mars. Solar system objects with tails have historically been called comets.

d) The composition of carbonaceous chondrites is heavily proto-solar, undifferentiated, lots of "dusty" supernova remnants. If it is not a comet, then its origin would be very mysterious.

So that's why 99% of the meteorite community thinks that they are extinct comets. Of course, we can't rule out that they might be refuse from flying saucers too, but you can see why such explanations raise more questions than they answer.

But did NASA's Stardust return cometary silicates lacking water?

Another name for hydrated silicates is concrete. If you took a piece of concrete from your sidewalk, turned a propane torch on it for a few minutes until it glowed, it would dehydrate the silicates and resemble the powdered cement you began with when you mixed it up in the first place. The silicates collected by Stardust were travelling some 6.1 km/s relative to the aerogel collector. If all that kinetic energy were turned into heat, the kinetic temperature would be about 125,000K, where the boiling point of silicates is perhaps 3000K, so the sand would completely vaporize.

Therefore the entire mission hinged on the ability of aerogels to stop a dust grain without thermalizing it, either by ablation or elastic collisions etc. Despite careful calibrations, every "track" left by a dust grain in the returned aerogels shows a "ballooning" in the middle, where the grain exploded, evidently from heating. So rather than saying it was a surprise not to find hydrated silicates, I would rather ask whether one should be surprised to find silicates at all. 

But Stardust was calibrated before launch, and showed that hydrated silicates from a carbonaceous chondrite would survive capture in the aerogels. Doesn't their absence prove that comets aren't carbonaceous chondrites?

Yes, they did do hypervelocity studies, but not having actual comet to test, they used proxies. Here's what I think is the difference between their proxies  (which included carbonaceous chondrites!) and a comet. When dust is lifted off the comet later to be collected by Stardust, did it consist of hydrated "mud" or anhydrous dust? Did it come from a water geyser or a vapor jet? To answer that, we have to discuss the life history of comets.

Carbonaceous chondrites are the end product of many, many trips around the Sun, where a comet melts and sublimates many times, effectively creating a well-mixed, well-hydrated precipitate or agglomerate that subsequently gets baked solid when all the liquid water boils off, leaving behind mostly hydrated minerals still stable at the relatively cool temperatures of the comet (some 400K according to Halley's armada). That's why the team expected hydrated minerals, because that is what is found in chondrites.

Young comets that have just arrived in the solar system, however, are big, fluffy and dusty, since the ice has never melted, the dust has come straight from a stellar furnace and is therefore anyhdrous, and sublimation pressure of evaporation drives anhydrous grains out of the fluffy comet's weak gravity well. This is the original "Whipple" model, which was widely accepted before the first visit to comet Halley.

All this changes when a comet melts, forms concrete, and then collects water. The jets coming off a melted comet are then water jets, or geysers, though limited to regions near the equator. Eventually, erosion changes the stability of the spinning comet, and it does a spin flip putting the "apple core" shape into a tumbling mode, or a prolate comet.

Adolescent or prolate comets have some melted spots (near the equator) and some dusty spots (near the poles). I think the ESA-ROSETTA mission to comet C-G is going to find an adolescent comet. My paper suggests that liquid water acts as a speed governor in a comet, keeping it right at the rotation rate that generates a Rayleigh-Taylor instability. If it spins faster, it melts more water, the water moves to the equator, and slows it down. But as a comet ages, it loses more water and becomes hollow. This means that the moment of angular inertia changes, so in effect the R-T "speed limit" keeps dropping. (The math is in the paper). So the age of comet can be determined from its spin rate.

Comet Wild was definitely up there in age, with some 90% of its water gone (based on density measurements and spin rate), with temperature maps showing nearly a constant 273K surface temperature, e.g. melting point of ice. All this suggests that we should expect hydrated minerals, or mud in its outgassing.

But when a comet is nearly hollow, the source of the outgassing is no longer the pockets of liquid water near the equator, where centrifugal force concentrates them, but the huge reservoir of gas in the interior bursting out of the thin spot at the pole. This can be seen by the stability of the comet jets in inertial space, which was certainly true of comet Borelly. This suggests that rather than water geysers, a comet of Wild's age will end its life with a gas geyser powered by unmelted dusty ice in its core, more similar to the first pass of a long-period, Oort-cloud comet.

And that means the dust scooped up by Stardust will likely contain clusters of anhydrous crystals held together by ice that evaporate within days or hours of being ejected from the comet. More mysterious is why the grains of fosterite "sand" were in the comet in the first place, which suggest that it may have scooped up terrestrial dirt in the inner solar system. I haven't tried to calculate it, but perhaps there is more cometary recycling of dirt than I had thought.

The Stardust team calibrated with hydrated silicates, so we know they can survive impact, so where are they? And how do you know that carbonaceous chondrites are comets? Maybe they are leftover planetesimals and the amino acids are primordial?

And just as concrete is a mixture of sand and hydrated silicates, it doesn't surprise me that the small, hydrated crystals (look at a microphotograph of concrete) would have exploded, leaving behind the fosterite filler. I think the observations are consistent with the hypothesis that the collection method evaporated the hydrated crystals, and that carbonaceous chondrites, while cometary in origin, have been processed differently than the material outgassed by a comet.

And while my description of the life-cycle of a comet is undoubtedly speculative, it is nonetheless based on observations both before and after the spacecraft-flyby era, as well as being consistent with the physics of rotating objects.

Whether carbonaceous chondrites are primordial planetesimals, water-bearing asteroids, or amorphous achondritic accretions, they would all produce tails when orbiting the Sun inside the orbit of Mars. And historically, anything with a tail was called a comet. You can call it lots of other things as well, but as far as I understand, it doesn't stop it from being a comet.

Finally, amino acids might have been in the primordial stuff that made the solar system, just as crude oil might have been part of stuff that constructed the earth (Tommy Gold's hypothesis), but amino acids would not have survived 5 billion years to the present, except perhaps buried under a foot of ice in the Oort cloud, because cosmic rays, sunlight and heat would have destroyed it. In fact, as I mentioned in a previous post, many of the 20 amino acids are missing in comets for precisely this reason, giving a "clock" of between 10-100 million years for their origin. And while this rules out recent contamination, it doesn't support primordial origin either.

So once again, I do not attribute ancient life to comets lightly, nor do I propose it for ideological reasons, but because there aren't any other theories that work. If any of your alternate explanations are better, then they have to explain: the missing amino-acid racemization, the missing amino acids, the missing non-biological amino acids, the presence of nucleobases, the dell-13 enhancements of both amino acids and nucleobases, the fossilized blue-green algae, the missing nitrogen of the fossils, the water-soluble nature of the fossilization; not to mention the older telescopic evidences: the cometary source of cyanogen, the outbursts of distant comets, the color of comet surfaces, the prolate shape of comets, the phylosilicates ejected by the Deep Impact probe, and the presence of sand grains in comets, to name a few. The data is overwhelming, and the only hypothesis that brings all these surprising observations together is that of life on comets.

Could any of these signatures be "front-loaded", primordial organic materials placed there by God for their subsequent use on Earth?

While I believe in front-loading, I don't think you and I agree on the mechanism. As I wrote on my website a month ago, I think front-loading is a term invented by Laplacian determinists, to explain how Newton's equation of motion, F=ma, can be based on initial conditions x0 and v0. Since QM has destroyed that Newtonian precision, and chaos theory destroyed the remaining hold-outs for initial conditions, it seems that now "algorithmic" front loading is proposed instead: where the universe is a computing machine executing some "boot sequence" program stored as information, e.g., the machine keeps updating its state based on a stored data base so it doesn't need phenomenal precision. Based on my understanding of the Turing problem of feedback, I have argued that even algorithmic front-loading is impossible. That is, there is no place to store the program separately from the computer, and hence "strong" Turing feedback prohibits a deterministic outcome.

Nevertheless, as you may have read in my "Cometary Biosphere" paper, I think the Earth shows a "bootstrap" progression of information and life just like a laptop starting Windows. So how can it be possible to believe in both a bootstrap Earth, and the impossibility of bootstrapping?

The resolution, I believe, lies in the nature of information.

When attempting to solve a problem on a balloon-born astronomy platform, where Harvard U had spent a million dollars on a star-camera pointing system, but failed to deliver a usable product, I concluded that the information in the starfield existed in both the CCD-image, and in its Fourier transform. Harvard researchers failed to lock onto the starfield because they neglected the information in the Fourier transform. This led me to an essay on Fourier transforms as an analogue of eternity and as another way to view global information.

Applying this insight to our bootstrap problem, the universe as created by God is like a computing machine playing back the boot-prom-program that does not itself exist locally in the machine, but globally, around the machine. That is, the hologram of the universe holds the information that drives the components of the universe toward complexity. You can also think of this as the QM entanglement of all the wavefunctions from the creation of the universe. Since something that is ubiquitous or global cannot be material, we are looking at information being "spirit". So in effect, we solve the Turing dilemma by getting rid of feedback between the parts, by getting rid of the parts, by making everything global.

Well such a view is unfortunately very close to Tipler's "The Physics of Immortality" and its quasi-Hegelian emphasis on "world spirit", or Teilhard de Chardin's "Omega Point", etc. But that is because Tipler gives the Fourier transform the primacy, whereas materialism gives the space-time locality the primacy. I would argue that neither is primary, but both are important.

This is akin to the Chalcedonian solution that Christ is 100% human and 100% divine. Such a view, of course, is nonsense, since something cannot be itself and its opposite without violating basic principles of logic. However Church Fathers at Chalcedon didn't derive its validity from dualism, or from denial of logic, but from an affirmation of the Trinity.

So the reason Tipler is wrong, the reason Teilhard is wrong, the reason Hegel is wrong, is that they deny the Trinity. The reason we can hold the world and the spirit in creative tension, is because there is a third thing that "is before all things (material), and in him all things hold together (spirit)." (Colossians) or even better, "the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe (material) by the word of his power (spirit)." (Hebrews).

We may be able to unravel the material of the universe, and even detect the spirit that holds it together, but the information lies in the word who created it.

Stephen Meyer, a founding member of  Discovery Institute, and cause celebre for the brouhaha generated by his peer reviewed paper on ID, has just come out with his best argument in a book. To recap the ID arguments: Dembski argued on the basis of mathematics, Behe argued for "irreducibly complex" biological mechanisms, and Johnson argued for legally coherent logic. Meyer bases his argument on the digital information system of the cell. His book hit the shelves last month, and while I have only read the front matter (as well as Meyer's previous essays) here is my response to a hostile review of his book by a biology major.

I received Signature in the Cell by Stephen C. Meyer in the mail today. That's 600 pages to kill in less than two weeks, but I'll do my best. I've started reading it already. I was momentarily surprised to recognize the name of the author. And while was involved in the scandal at the Smithsonian, I don't believe he is guilty of much beyond doing poor science.

This is kind of you, but whether he is guilty of manslaughter or not really makes no difference to the arguments he presents. You will have to stop moralizing about the motives of scientists and address their purported claims. Ad hominem is not and never was, a scientific response.

The real breach of ethics came from Robert Sternberg, who by-passed the peer review process in order to sneak on Meyer's article into the journal the Proceeding of the Biological Society of Washington.

No, that is NOT what a blue-ribbon congressional committee concluded. It would do you good to read what the lawyers say, because scientists make really poor legal eagles. Take my 30-year-experience word for it, no peer review operates the way a journal claims. No ethical breeches were made, merely the breech of publishing something that was deemed a priori blasphemous, which is generally where the good science is located. Read Thomas Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" if you want more details on what was really going on in the debate. But more importantly, ad hominem rebuttal does not actually address the science in the article. If you are going to attack ID for what it says, you should not attack it for who says it.

There is a lot of misinformation about the events surrounding this episode.

Indeed there is. It would do you good to get Sternberg's opinion too. Watch the "Expelled" movie and you will see the interview with him discussing this "scandal".

In fact, the book's prologue spews lies and misinformation starting on the first page. Luckily for the author, this early dishonesty is independent of the intellectual work he purports to have conducted, which I have taken time to evaluate.

Hmm. Once again, attacking the irrelevant details of a story is just another method of ad hominem, for it really doesn't matter who your mother is, frankly, when evaluating scientific debate. And when you research the "lies and misinformation" I guarantee you will be astounded how the story you've been told has been twisted as well. Best not to argue over irrelevant points, you can't win, but you can lose.

I would like to note that Meyer states that he published an article in a respected peer-reviewed journal. While this is technically correct, the peer-review of his particular article was never carried out.

You're nit-picking at irrelevancies. It was peer reviewed by three reviewers, despite what you may hear otherwise, both Stephen Meyer and Richard Sternberg will tell you how. And as I told you before, peer-review is a murky enough process that you really don't want to get into a debate of what constitutes valid "peer-review". The stories are quite spicy, and I have an evening full of them.

It is also important to note that there has not been a publication of a pro-intelligent design article in any peer-reviewed scientific journal since (nor was there before).

Um, quite the contrary (and you can go to Discovery Institute and check out their list). But you have made a claim in the form of a universal negative, which everyone since Aristotle has pointed out is extremely difficult to validate. I don't think you can exhaustively prove this claim until you have read every peer-reviewed article ever published and asked if it supported design. But if you did, you would find many more than you just stated. (Yockey's 1992 paper comes to mind, though the man himself eschews ID, his papers support it.)

So in general you are quite right, there are not many peer-reviewed articles, but there have been two dozen or so that have been highly influential. But you might ask why this is an important point to make? Were there any publications of the inverse square law of gravity before Newton? Did that invalidate his theory?

Meyer makes the point that truly innovative work doesn't fare well in the peer-reviewed journals, simply because one can't make a lengthy argument in that brief format, and abbreviated papers are too incomplete for reviewers to approve. After all, even Darwin had to publish his innovative work in a book. So whether there have been one, two, or a dozen peer-reviewed articles doesn't make a theory any more valid or invalid. Science is NOT consensus, politics is.

My very first point of contention is that there seems to be a radical misunderstanding about what evolutionary theory claims to explain and what it does not.

You are catching on to the whole problem with this debate. When there are different definitions for the main terms, then how can any consensus be achieved? But the problem is worse that that, the problem is that multiple definitions are used and interchanged causing ambiguities that are intentional; a method known to students of Aristotle as "equivocation". Once again, lawyers are all over these rhetorical shenanigans, while scientists seem oblivious. That's why Phillip Johnson, a lawyer, got involved in ID, because without knowing the science, he got very suspicious of the equivocation he saw in the defence of Darwin.

Meyer's point about intelligent design does not necessarily conflict with evolutionary theory, though it is closely related. Meyer argues about origin of life, which evolution technically does not address.

No, if you read Meyer carefully, he objects to both Evolution (as a deterministic system of speciation) as well as origin of life (OOL). The point is that if bacterial life is designed, then why isn't invertebrate life, vertebrate life, mammals and primates? There is no a priori reason for terminating design with the first bacterium. The same principles that detect design in OOL, can detect it in transitional forms as well. Which is why Darwinists see OOL as the camel's nose, as well they should.

But your technicality for evolution is just that, an equivocating technicality that is easily dismissed. The problem is that there are 5+ definitions for evolution, and when someone brings an argument against one, then retreat to another definition is pure and simple equivocation. I don't have space to enumerate the many definitions of evolution, here are just a few:

1) evolution-1: change over time. -- Both ID and Darwinists accept this.
2) evolution-2: change over time caused by random chance.-- Both ID and Darwinists accept this.
3) evolution-3: change over time caused by random chance leading to fundamentally greater complexity -- Darwinists accept this, ID doesn't.
4) evolution-4: absemce of change over time due to any other process than chance and law (physics) --Darwinists accept this, ID doesn't.
5) evolution-5: Non-existent, impossibility of any forces in nature except those due to material causes (physics) --Darwinists accept this, ID doesn't.

OOL problems fall into the category evolution-4, which is a subset of evolution-5. Claiming that OOL is a mystery to evolution (and therefore not defended) would still permit miracles and ID, so that despite not wanting to talk about OOL, no Darwinist will abandon evolution-4 and evolution-5. That's why it is an equivocation to say evolution is technically not about OOL.

(We could say a great deal about -4 and -5 and metaphysics, but it would distract from the science right now.)

Evolution by natural selection describes a mechanism to explain how lines of organisms change over time. It is used to elucidate the mechanism by which, from generation to generation to generation, organisms gradually change. We know from incredible amounts of data, fossil and genomic evidence to cite two sources, that organisms do change over time. We can see this very clearly in bacterial evolution today because bacteria reproduce so quickly.

You are defending evolution 1, and evolution-2. There is no debate here. There is, however, a debate whether evolution-3 has ever been observed even in bacteria. See Michael Behe's "The Edge of Evolution" for a recent discussion of the malaria parasite by a microbiologist. The problem is the that all observed evolution in bacteria (notably anti-biotic resistance) is devolution, not evolution. The resistant species is less robust in the wild than the original, which cannot be an argument for "progress".

The issue of origin of life, or abiogenesis, has implications for evolution but in no way can call evolution into question.

Indeed it can. Because if instead evolution was caused by--as I have peer-reviewed published papers describing--bacterial transport on a comet, then the whole scenario of "descent with modification" is called into question. If life arrived from outside the Earth, then we aren't seeing "change over time", but "transport over time", making evolution no more correct than saying your old neighbors mutated into that new family with kids.

It is origin of life that Meyer claims to address. However, what he actually does is address origin of information of life. These are two closely related but subtly different claims. Essentially, he constructs a straw man by saying that DNA has information in the form of the genetic code and that since we see code today in the form of digital, which is man-made, the genetic code must also be made by some intelligence which he terms a "designer."

Look, it is a rhetorical device to insist that your opponents arguments are "straw men", when you cannot refute them. Whether or not DNA==Life or merely DNA-->Life is an irrelevant distinction. Or as they say in rhetoric, "a distinction without a difference". There are no examples of life without DNA/RNA. If you want to call prions "life", then you have most of the biology community against you. So it is perfectly within the purview of science to replace a mushy biology word with a concrete physical analogue, and then draw conclusions from that physical analog.

But what he fails to adequately address is the fact that DNA is not the only material that can store information.

Again, this is a distinction without a difference. Information is stored in countless ways on your laptop, in the RAM, in the buffers, in the monitor, but if it evaporates when you turn it off, it isn't the kind of information that is important to your thesis. DNA is the permanent record of info in the cell, and everything else derives from it. None of the other information storage devices are relevant to the question of speciation. In fact, Darwin formally disallowed information flow backwards from the environment into the genome, condemning Lamarck's thesis, (which is now being supported as the newly discovered "epigenetic" information). Biologists even give this one-directional information flow a name, "The Central Dogma" is that the DNA holds the info, and everything else derives from it. If your complaint about other sources of info were valid, you would have to erase the "central dogma" from the textbooks.

Further, he asserts that any assemblage of information must be artificially created. Both these statements are false. Proteins, RNA, clay, and many other pre-biotic molecules can store and replicate informaiton, especially if all these materials are allowed to interact with each other, which is almost definitely the case.

Okay, we now have two T/F issues that you think are central to Meyer's thesis. He says:

(1) DNA is the central information storage of life, and hence to OOL. You say no. Let's examine the evidence:

a) Do proteins contain information? Yes. Can they replicate that information? Not very well. Can they store that information for any important length of time (say, 100 years, the lifespan of tortoises and some people.) No. Can they store it for 1 year? Not without enormous error rates. Can they store it for 1 day? Not at the part-per-billion error rates of DNA. Why? Because the peptide bonds get hydrolyzed, and several of the amino acids that make up proteins are unstable. They are nearly useless an information bank, with cellular lifetimes on the order of seconds or minutes.

b) RNA. Can it replicate? Not really, it is 99% the product of a cell that has DNA in it. Does it have information? You bet. Can it store information for 100 years? No, it is much less stable than DNA. Typical lifetimes in the cell are again seconds to minutes. Does this invalidate Meyer's thesis? No, he specifically mentions that DNA and RNA are considered the same in principle, but the "Central Dogma" says that RNA is produced from DNA. So Meyer is merely going by the book here, and if you want to argue a "RNA-world" hypothesis, you will have to take a controversial thesis. But you called this pre-biotic, which is ridiculous. RNA is as biotic as DNA.

c) Clay. Can they replicate? No, they are formed from bacterial interaction with silicate rock. This is not replication anymore than feces replicate. Do they have information? No. Then what are we arguing about? Someones half-baked speculation on OOL from clay. Why are you then so sure that there is information involved? Because you relied on faulty information sources, who needed this as a way to solve the OOL problem for evolution-5.

d) If you have "many more" pre-biotic information molecules then let the world know, it would really help the discouraged OOL community.

So your objection turns out to be another distinction without a difference. There may be other ways to store information, but none of them turn out to be important. Perhaps what Meyer said was that DNA was the only important one, and I believe you are in agreement with him.

(2) Meyer says that any assemblage of information must be artificially created.

Is clay artificially created? Yes, by bacteria. Is RNA? Yes, by DNA.
Are proteins? Yes by RNA and ribosomes.

So once again, you are in complete agreement with him. Find me some information that was created by chance or by physical law. That is what would prove Meyer wrong. Crystals are made by physical law, but they lack information. Constellations are made by chance, but they don't encode any message. Until you offer an alternative, I think you are in complete agreement with Meyer here.

Next he tries to play games with large numbers, again employing a straw man.

I hate straw men as much as the next guy, but you will have to explain why these are straw, and why real men don't obey the same laws of physics that dominate these number problems. Sir Fred Hoyle, an ardent atheist and materialist, did the numbers for evolution and arrived at nearly the same calculation. See his 1987 book "The Mathematics of Evolution". It isn't a straw man argument, and it has never been satisfactorily solved.

He is also guilty of using what wikipedia call "weasel words." Here is a link explaining them. Weasel words are sometimes a problem in wikipedia articles when a person wishes to put spin on an otherwise largely objective article. Meyer uses words like "random" and "chance" in sometimes inappropriate ways to create the illusion of clarity while actually attempting to make use of the common connotations of the words to manipulate the reader's opinion.

We are descending into ad hominem again. I mentioned that you yourself used equivocation earlier (the British use vocabulary where an American uses idiom), so be careful whom you accuse. If Meyer is guilty of equivocation, then carefully distinguish between the two meanings and see if his argument depends on confusing the two. If not, then he is no more guilty of "weasel words" than the "pro-lifers and the anti-aborts" are. Face it, words have connotations along with denotations. Get used to it, because one day someone will do it to you, and calling them names doesn't really pack the same persuasive punch. (BTW this is why newspapers and dead-tree media are going the way of the dinosaur--they decided weasel words were necessary in reporting the news the right way. Morality crusades and ad hominem have a way of destroying their messengers.)

Meyer misdefines a scientific theory, calls it the "chance hypothesis," and attacks an idea that no serious scientist really endorses. The "chance hypothesis" that he describes was tossed out more than 40 years ago, way before much of the really robust and insightful work in pre-biotic chemistry was performed.

Umm, just because an experiment was declared "old-fashioned", doesn't mean that the results aren't still cited as evidence. The Miller-Urey experiment and the Oparin hypothesis remain in every textbook despite the fact that they are not considered valid mechanisms for OOL. The point Meyer is making, is that these hypotheses lie at the foundations of biology, and when they are overturned, there is a serious problem with the super-structure built upon them. Calling them out-of-date, does nothing to uphold the logical superstructure. It is the status-quo biologist who has to find a replacement for the chance hypothesis, or the entire Darwinian edifice is endangered. (As every serious Darwinist along with Darwin readily admits.)

Below is one example of hundreds of papers published in well-respected, peer-reviewed scientific journals (which didn't by-pass the peer-review process).

Quantity is no substitute for quality, and the sheer quantity of papers pushing weird OOL theories does not make them believable or even make them probable. I can tell you the funniest I've heard, about hydrogen-peroxide based life on Mars. Simply hilarious. Remember, quantity is not quality, consensus is not science.

This is a link to a podcast from Nature magazine that interviews the author of a paper that identifies mechanisms for the spontaneous formation of pyrimidine RNA nucleotides in the conditions of the early earth.

I am peripherally involved in the OOL debate, because I wrote some papers on cometary transport of life, and listened to various OOL arguments against comets and supporting an Earth-origin. So having listened to these people come to the Astrobiology conference and attack my friends, I can only laugh when I hear their arguments. Since you take this so seriously, let me point out a few relevant issues the paper seems to overlook. Here's some of the abstract:

Here we show that activated pyrimidine ribonucleotides can be formed in a short sequence that bypasses free ribose and the nucleobases, and instead proceeds through arabinose amino-oxazoline and anhydronucleoside intermediates. The starting materials for the synthesis—cyanamide, cyanoacetylene, glycolaldehyde, glyceraldehyde and inorganic phosphate—are plausible prebiotic feedstock molecules and the conditions of the synthesis are consistent with potential early-Earth geochemical models. Although inorganic phosphate is only incorporated into the nucleotides at a late stage of the sequence, its presence from the start is essential as it controls three reactions in the earlier stages by acting as a general acid/base catalyst, a nucleophilic catalyst, a pH buffer and a chemical buffer. For prebiotic reaction sequences, our results highlight the importance of working with mixed chemical systems in which reactants for a particular reaction step can also control other steps.

a) The first point is the admission of the impossible
From a colleague's blog:

"The first point worth making is that new advances are often shown to be significant by referring to the lack of progress that had earlier characterised the field. This is often a surprise to the general public, who are typically fed a story that the problems are largely cracked and abiogenesis researchers (OOL) are confident of tying up the loose ends in the near future. Wade's report refers to the solution of "a problem that for 20 years has thwarted researchers trying to understand the origin of life - how the building blocks of RNA, called nucleotides, could have spontaneously assembled themselves in the conditions of the primitive earth."
Van Noorden explains the problem like this:
"An RNA polymer is a string of ribonucleotides, each made up of three distinct parts: a ribose sugar, a phosphate group and a base - either cytosine or uracil, known as pyrimidines, or the purines guanine or adenine. Imagining how such a polymer might have formed spontaneously, chemists had thought the subunits would probably assemble themselves first, then join to form a ribonucleotide. But even in the controlled atmosphere of a laboratory, efforts to connect ribose and base together have met with frustrating failure."
Abiogenesis researchers adopt either 'law' or 'chance' as causal explanations. They have rejected 'design' (not because it does not work, but because they insist on all causation being material). The new research is driven by a confidence in 'law'. The researchers are chemists. For them, the origin of life is a matter of chemistry. Thus, Sutherland, the lead author, is quoted as saying:
"My ultimate goal is to get a living system (RNA) emerging from a one-pot experiment. We can pull this off. We just need to know what the constraints on the conditions are first." [and] "My assumption is that we are here on this planet as a fundamental consequence of organic chemistry, so it must be chemistry that wants to work."
What, then, has been achieved? The researchers have synthesised both pyrimidine ribonucleotides (but not the purine ribonucleotides). As Van Noorden described it, they have "shown that it is possible to build one part of RNA from small molecules". They havenot formed RNA molecules; they have not addressed the chirality problem, they have not generated any biological information and they have not made RNA do anything of biological significance, let alone become clothed with a membrane and undergo replication.
Nevertheless, what they have done can be applauded as an elegant example of systems chemistry. A specific bond was needed between the Ribose and the Nucleobase, and a decade of research proved that the bond was not going to form directly. So what the researchers did was to create the bond and then turn the components on each side of the bond into the desired building blocks of the Ribonucleotide. Phosphate, which previously caused problems for OOL researchers, becomes a catalyst. Szostak's News and Views essay draws attention to the elegance of their approach:
"But in a remarkable example of 'systems chemistry', in which reactants from different stages of a pathway are allowed to interact, Powner et al. show that phosphate tames the combinatorial explosion, allowing oxygenous and nitrogenous reactants to interact fruitfully."[. . .] "The penultimate reaction of the sequence, in which the phosphate is attached to the nucleoside, is another beautiful example of the influence of systems chemistry in this set of interlinked reactions. The phosphorylation if facilitated by the presence of urea; the urea comes from the phosphate-catalysed hydrolysis of a by-product from an earlier reaction in the sequence."

b) The second point is the redefinition of the "Plausible"
As you know, Miller-Urey tried to start with a plausible reducing atmosphere, added electricity, and found amino acids. The whole argument they made was that this was a plausible composition for a plausible atmosphere. Unfortunately, both assumptions have been challenged, and the Miller-Urey experiment is no longer used as OOL evidence (except in biology textbooks!) Not because it doesn't work, but because it is implausible. But compared to Miller-Urey, the compounds and concentrations of "cyanamide, cyanoacetylene, glycolaldehyde, glyceraldehyde and inorganic phosphate" are totally and completely implausible! Not only so, but the plausible introduction of water and oxygen completely poison the reaction. So the RNA-world hypothesis is watering down the word "plausible" to mean "anything that we can do in a lab".
Here's a more erudite description from the same colleague's blog:

"It is good chemistry, but does it achieve a major advance in abiogenesis research? Questions can certainly be raised. The researchers argue that they are not starting with any unrealistic initial conditions: "We don't use any way-out scenarios - all the conditions are consistent with what we know about early Earth." However, this is disputed.
"The flaw with this kind of research is not in the chemistry. The flaw is in the logic - that this experimental control by researchers in a modern laboratory could have been available on the early Earth," says Robert Shapiro, a chemist at New York University. [and] Dr. Robert Shapiro [. . .] said the recipe "definitely does not meet my criteria for a plausible pathway to the RNA world." He said that cyano-acetylene, one of Dr. Sutherland's assumed starting materials, is quickly destroyed by other chemicals and its appearance in pure form on the early earth "could be considered a fantasy." [and] "But while this is a step forward, it's not the whole picture," [James] Ferris [of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.] points out. "It's not as simple as putting compounds in a beaker and mixing it up. It's a series of steps. You still have to stop and purify and then do the next step, and that probably didn't happen in the ancient world."

c) The third point is the unintentional support of ID.
But "anything we can do in a lab" is done by intelligent agents, chemists, who control the temperature and composition to get the result they need. Since this is unlikely to occur by chance in the pre-biotic Earth, what this experiment really reveals is just how much ID is required to make ribonucleic rings in the absence of life. Here's my colleague's blog again:

"It can be argued that the chemical reactions documented actually yield products that are intelligently designed. The experimental conditions are engineered to selectively accumulate some reaction products (by fractional crystallisation) and selectively destroy others (by the influence of UV radiation). These conditions are considered more plausible in Darwin's hypothetical "little warm pond". Indeed, Wade's report says: "Dr. Sutherland's report supports Darwin". This is significant because the emphasis in abiogenesis research has shifted in recent years to other scenarios - notably at mid-ocean ridge locations. Those who find themselves impressed with the potential of this research would do well to reflect on the way the chemistry is engineered to achieve the outcomes and the associated fine tuning of environmental factors. These are not Darwinian emphases!

d) The fourth point is the failure to address the problem: what makes RNA special.
All this work is just on the pyrimidine rings! We haven't even discussed the bases that line the RNA, which is where the real information is found. We're debating the abiotic manufacture of the machinery and haven't even gotten to the primary evidence of ID, the information coded on the RNA. Nor have we discussed peculiarities of living RNA versus the RNA of this reaction, namely, the chirality of life versus the non-chirality of chemistry. We still haven't figured out the machinery, and likely never will. The blog again:

"Of the other limitations mentioned above, the chirality problem is noted in Wade's report: "A serious puzzle about the nature of life is that most of its molecules are right-handed or left-handed, whereas in nature mixtures of both forms exist. Dr. Joyce [an expert on the chemical origin of life at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif.] said he had hoped an explanation for the one-handedness of biological molecules would emerge from prebiotic chemistry, but Dr. Sutherland's reactions do not supply any such explanation."

e) Conclusion
Does any of this discussion give me confidence that we are on track to explain RNA-World? No, because if anything, these "advances" admit just how far away we are from getting even one aspect of the RNA-world to function, much less the coding and the self-enzymatic activity. Miller-Urey was wrong about a "protein-first" OOL solution, but the RNA-first solution is even more implausible and difficult to imagine.

Furthermore, Meyer also "takes on" other scientific theories by the same misrepresent and attack method.

Attacking is the nature of science. Misrepresenting isn't. So if he is guilty of misrepresenting, then you are duty bound to make it clear what is being misrepresented. Sure, you can quote PZ Myers at Pharyngula who claims all sorts of misrepresentation, but my point is that after the ad hominem name calling and accusations are finished, no one is able to clarify the precise misrepresentation nor demonstrate which logical error was committed. In other words, it wasn't a misrepresentation that was at fault, but a disrespection problem; it wasn't the science but the religion that was violated. Calling blasphemy a misrepresentation is a category mistake.

If he were to appreciate the common sense of evolution, he would understand why his attacks don't make sense.

Science is not common sense. This is rule #1 in every text book on the philosophy of science. Otherwise we could all be arm chair scientists. The only reason for scientific experiments is that science violates common sense. Metaphysically stated, nature is external to us, and therefore we can never predict what nature will do without an experiment.

He uses highly evolved macromolecules and asserts that this huge complex couldn't have come together by random chance. Well duh! Evolution says that it would have been the result of 4 billion years of small changes and gradual additions. Further evolution asserts that each form along the way had to have served some purpose in the cell, though that purpose could change as other elements also evolved to shift structure and function.

I'm glad we are in agreement about the mathematics of evolved macromolecules. But you are taking on faith two further assumptions: (a) that 4 billion years of small changes will accomplish the big changes; (b) each change had a beneficial function at that time. Both assumptions can be tested. Yes, evolution really is a theory and not religion if it can be tested. And both experiments reveal the opposite conclusion.

a) Not billions, not trillions, not even quadrillions of years are sufficient to account for the information changes between bacteria and humans, or OOL. The simplest bacteria still has more information in it than the probabilistic resources of every hydrogen atom in the universe (10^80) rearranged at their vibrational speed (microseconds=10^-6s) for the age of the universe (10^15 seconds) = 10^(101) combinations. Because the amount of information is closer to (10^10,000) which is Hoyle's estimate. Hubert Yockey, another non-ID atheist, gets 10^40,000 information bits, I believe.

b) Most mutations are not beneficial. In fact, most beneficial mutations involve 2 or 3 changes, which have probabilities that become vanishingly small, because they have to happen simultaneously if the organism is to survive. Considering that there are fatal mutations between the beneficial ones, you need to recognize just how difficult it is to evolve a change in a protein. The only reason it has been stated as an easy problem is because people wanted the conclusion, but didn't want the experiment. Once again, the science-is-not-common-sense problem.

Meyer also rudely dismisses the criticism of Kenneth Miller, a professor of biology at Brown University and a devout Christian.

Miller is neither polite, nor devout. But this is an ad hominem argument. Most importantly, he is wrong.

If you would like a Christian's take on evolution, I suggest reading one of his books--Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution or Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul.

Such views are by Theistic Evolutionists, who are really not theistic at all, they are deistic, which either out of ignorance or malice, they do not differentiate. That is, they are much closer to Unitarians than Christians. This includes Frances Collins too, and the former Calvin College prof, Howard Van Till. But once again, this is all ad hominem, and irrelevant to the question at hand.

It is not until chapter 14 that Meyer even addresses any chemical or biological questions at all. He attempts to discredit the RNA world hypothesis with 5 "problems." The first problem he highlights is being solved right now, piece by piece. The link to the podcast above addresses one of the issues with prebiotic chemistry, and issue which is commonly known in that field of study as the biggest problem with the RNA world hypothesis. And look, we've just figured it out. So, so assume that we won't figure out how the rest of it works is defeatist.

Umm, I think the claims to victory are a bit premature (see my earlier comments on the Nature paper). Not only so, but human history tells us that hubris is a bigger problem than humility. I would say that RNA world has so many compelling and orthogonal counter-arguments, that there really is no chance that it will survive, say, even 10 years. It is less compelling than Oparin in his day, or Miller-Urey in theirs.

The second problem isn't actually a problem. He just states that a highly evolved system functions more efficiently than a less evolved one. By "evolved" I mean several things, not simply complexity. Specificity is a major part of it. There are an ever increasing number of papers that identify RNA functioning as enzymes in a range of critical roles. To say that RNA can't do this function well enough is just silly.

On the contrary, it isn't silly because it is based on experiment. The fact of the matter is, that RNA is not the primary component of life, DNA is. I may sound like a broken record, but it is the Central Dogma for a reason. One would have to assume that OOL began with RNA, and then magically converted to DNA later, wiping out all traces of RNA life. So the first problem is how RNA-first could have evolved and then vanished.

Likewise, DNA holds more data than RNA, so the second argument is that one would have to assume that the less info-rich molecule created the more-info rich molecule, which is like saying heat flows from colder to hotter. And I could go on. The logic is so strained as to make one wonder what RNA has going for it at all, that it should have become the OOL favorite.

The third problem makes a big jump in logic and again forgets that evolution occurs by a series of small changes rather than giant leaps.

I think we are dealing with the gambler's paradox here. The fact that rolling snake-eyes 100 times in a row is unlikely, cannot be made more likely by breaking it down into 100 separate rolls of the dice. You cannot make evolution more likely by talking about intermediate steps. Statistics won't let you. But more importantly, biology won't let you.

He also asserts that there is only one way for a coding system to have evolved, which is quite absurd. Explaining all the problems with his logic on this point would take a very long time.

Nevertheless, it would be quite instructive. Because as you take your opponents argument seriously, you will discover the weaknesses in your own. His logic, along with his education, is more extensive than your own, which means you really have no reason to dismiss him, other than the "argument from authority" of your teacher's unsubstantiated opinions.

The fourth problem again misapplies "chance" and statistics, among other things.

I have yet to meet a Darwinian biologist who can do statistics. I would wager 10:1 odds that his statistics are better than yours. Check out Michael Behe's blog on the errors made by biology PhD statistics.

The fifth complains that we haven't figured out how to make a specific RNA enzyme. This is perhaps a challenge for scientists to figure out, but is not sufficient to toss out the RNA world theory unless you subscribe to Michael Behe's motto "This is too hard for me to figure out, so I'll just say God did it." Behe, btw, has claimed for years that the bacterial flagella couldn't have evolved. The problem is that some scientists found not just one, but several plausible mechanisms for its evolution. Behe, predictably, maintains that he is right.

Well, your profs, predictably, claim that Behe is wrong. Being able to predict a scientist's biasses does not, I repeat myself, invalidate his arguments. But Behe doesn't say what you just claimed he said. This is another one of those equivocation problems. Behe claims that there are three causes for an action: law, chance and design. Design is not a "gap theory", it is not the absence of law and chance that defines it, though certainly it is a strong argument for its existence. Rather, it is the presence of a certain quantity, which Dembski calls "complex specified information", that defines design. Behe demonstrates why bacterial flagella are complex, he demonstrates why they are specified, and he demonstrates why they possess information, from that he infers design.

Now materialists only allow for two explanations: law and chance. This means that they have no explanation when flagellar motors are highly improbable and no law defines their construction. They fall back on either speculation (Darwin's speciality) casting about for some law that will derive this result, or they rely on some incredibly impossible accident. But unfortunately, speculation is not science. It is not experimental. It is not data. It is merely that, speculation. So just because Darwin can "imagine a warm pond" for OOL does not make it any more likely, nor imagining a "injection mechanism" for flagellar motors, makes it any more probable. Not until an experiment demonstrates OOL, or demonstrates the evolution of flagella from some less intelligent precursor, are we left with anything more than pure speculation. This is why Behe doesn't have to accept their "plausibility" arguments because there's nothing there to see. See the discussion of "plausibility" above.

Most of these criticisms are what can be termed an "argument from ignorance."

Au contraire, pierre. Argument from ignorance requires there to be a lack of evidence to make a case. On the contrary, as I said earlier, design is a positive evidential argument from observation of complex specified information. Darwin and the evolutionary biologists are the ones making speculative arguments from ignorance.

In chapter 17, Meyer attempts to state that he has not been arguing from ignorance. However, if we are to read him literally, he seems to be arguing that aliens designed life on earth.

And why not? We have comets with fossilized life on them, some of which we have never seen on Earth. I refer you to spie04.pdf, as well as spie05, spie06, spie07 and spie08. (I didn't have the money to attend SPIE this year, though I was planning to describe magnetite framboids as a bacterial adaptation to cometary living.)

Even so, his argument puts aliens and God on equal footing as being the agents of creating life on earth. Actually, I take that back, he actually gives aliens a slight advantage.

And this is a problem for an atheist? What exactly do you find objectionable about this?

Further, his justification for not accepting that in the future science may be able to give a more complete picture of how life began through natural means is dubious. He asserts that science makes similar assertions all the time. However, this is another misrepresentation.

Again, I think this is clear and obviously true. So be careful about calling blasphemy a misrepresentation, that's a category mistake.

For instance, the conservation laws of thermodynamics say that matter and energy are never created or destroyed.

No, actually they don't. Materialists (from 500BC until 1904 AD) used to say that matter is neither created nor destroyed, but Einstein demonstrated that they are convertible. So now some materialists say that the sum of matter+energy is constant, but again, string theorists and multiverse cosmologists disagree. In neither case did thermodynamics have anything to say about it.

The reason for this is that if matter or energy were created or destroyed the universe could not exist given the known laws of physics.

On the contrary, Fred Hoyle wanted a materialist universe with chance evolution, but knew that it was too improbable. So he suggested that the universe has lasted forever, constantly creating matter out of nothing and expanding so as to maintain a constant density. He kept the physics the same, even with a small rate of ex nihilo hydrogen creation. It was the most popular cosmology among astrophysicists from 1930 to 1960. Read about it in Robert Jastrow's "God and the Astronomers" [1978].

However, he is not justified in saying that we will never figure out the origin of life because doing so is 1) possible, 2) increasingly likely, and 3) would violate well established laws of physics.

I don't know quite what you meant to say with this sentence. The OOL problem can be solved, since obviously there was a beginning to everything, it just may take aliens to solve it. It is the a priori elimination of all intelligence and aliens from the set of potential explanations that cannot be justified.

I stopped reading after chapter 17 due to time constrictions, but also because he stops talking about anything scientifically relevant.

That's a pity.

This book cites no experimental science in support of its thesis.

I found all kinds of scientific support. I'm not sure why you said this.

It avoids most recently published scientific work, mostly because it would cast doubt on his assertions (something he admits to having done before).

No, a book has to be finished sometime, and that means publishing something that is at least a year out-of-date (given the lead times for publication). Nor has there been any progress in OOL or DNA research in the past few years that has changed any of the standard models, as your own citation of RNA-world demonstrates. He's as relevant today as he was 2 years ago.

He misrepresents current scientific understanding and misrepresents the criticisms that have been raised against him, albeit cleverly.

You're making a category mistake again.

The author, whose PhD is in a humanity discipline, not a science discipline, argues just as I would expect him to given his degree, which is in History and Philosophy. Thus, he gives long accounts of history and trivia and recites lots of well-accepted philosophical thought to establish rapport with his readers (though he bored me with long-windedness) before pulling a sort of bait and switch by getting the reader to keep agreeing with him and then making an assertion that is poorly supported. And he did this repeatedly.

I fail to find the "poor support" that you cite. Unless you mean "blasphemy" again.

It's one of the more cleverly written pieces in a long line of intelligent design and creationist dogma. Still, it is written to make a political or religious point rather than a scientific one.

There is no such thing as a purely "scientific point", all objective arguments have subjective presuppositions. Read Kuhn. Really read Kuhn. His advisor was a logical positivist who expected that sociology would support this myth you are citing about a "scientific view". Kuhn's scientific data did not support the myth. Read Berger and Luckman on the sociology of knowledge. You really need to interact more with the liberal arts faculty who have been saying this for 50(!) years to the deaf ears of biologists. Even physicists are beginning to catch on, albeit slowly.

This is not surprising because intelligent design is by definition not science.

By whose definition? Biologists? And how, precisely, does one do an experiment to find the definition of science? Isn't definition, by definition, a non-scientific activity? So then, since definition is by definition not empirical, we must not let unscientific definers define what scientists can do. If, on the other hand, science is defined by what scientists do, than ID is a truly wonderful scientific field, pursued by Aristotle on up to the present. It is materialists who are in a minority.

Our scientific understanding a vast range of disciplines advances weekly (with peer-reviewed publications) and we gain a deeper understanding of the natural world. There is still a vast amount we do not yet know or understand. There is much left to discover. But to arrive at a conclusion and then try to argue and manipulate the public understanding of science for personal reasons is not ethical.

Agreed! So you should never use ad hominem arguments, or let statements about the "lack of peer-reviewed papers" stand in the way of doing science.

It should be recognized as such and discarded.

Isn't this conclusion at odds with the previous sentence?

This is an out of the blue question, but I was wondering - do you think there's anything in Leibniz's talk of monads that resonates with your views on recursion? I was browsing the monadology entry on wikipedia (Horrible place, I know, but still) and saw this:

"*(III)* Composite substances or matter are "actually sub-divided without end" and have the properties of their infinitesimal parts (§65). Some understanding how this is possible has been provided by the recent development of fractals. A notorious passage (§67) explains that "each portion of matter can be conceived as like a garden full of plants, or like a pond full of fish. But each branch of a plant, each organ of an animal, each drop of its bodily fluids is also a similar garden or a similar pond". There are no interactions between different monads nor between entelechies and their bodies but everything is regulated by the pre-established harmony (§§78-9). Leibniz concludes that "if we could understand the order of the universe well enough, we would find that it surpasses all the wishes of the wisest people, and that it is impossible to make it better than it is — not merely in respect of the whole in general, but also in respect of ourselves in particular" (§90)."

I only mention it since you referred to fractals recently with discussion of consciousness, and it seems like an idea related to recursion.

To be honest, Leibniz' monads always seemed a bit eccentric to me, a lot like PAM Dirac's obsession with powers of 2. But if you will notice in the last sentence, I mentioned one's and two's. I've got this obsession with the number three, which I suppose makes me as eccentric as both of these men. Actually I wasn't always this eccentric, I was infected by my theology professor at seminary, Dr Vern Poythress, who has a second doctorate in math from Harvard. He wrote a book on trinities, and sees them everywhere. As both a mathematician and a theologian, his horizons stretch from the foundations of mathematics to the foundations of theology, from physics to metaphysics, from mechanics to ethics.

My contribution has been the intuitive reasoning of a physicist (a trait that separates mathematical physicists from applied mathematicians). So I've suggested that most of philosophy can be described as a struggle between Heraclitus and Parmenides, between the one and the many, between the transcendent and the immanent. You will notice that these problems are one's and two's. The critical contribution of Christianity was the number three.

Now a 2+1=3 trinity is unstable to being chopped in two pieces again. In physicist terms, the problem can be reduced to a simpler problem. The only way to prevent this from happening, is to balance it so carefully, it can't be chopped up: eg. a 1 + 1 + 1 = 3 "tri-unity". Most of the heresies of the early church arise from this confusion, and if you read the text of the Nicene Creed, you will discover it attempts to protect 1+1+1 rigorously.

There's a bunch more things one can say in support of a robust tri-unity and its relation to recursion, and I refer you to a paper a wrote for my "Philosophical Foundations of Theology" course with Paul Helm last winter. It mentions Jonathan Edwards' attempt to use recursion to argue for a trinity (and personal consciousness) so there is a deeper connection to mind than perhaps is obvious.

But the relevance to Leibniz is that he wanted to go from Monads to Life without seeing the necessity of Triads. It's a big mistake, and the same one made by Pantheism, Hegel, Islam and Materialism. Likewise, it is a big mistake to think that one can go from Monads to Duals to Life, or from Duals to Triads to Life. Generally speaking, anything with a duality in it is bad news. All these constructions are unstable, as Eastern Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky argues in his book "In the Image of God". I've got some blogs on that stuff too if you are interested.

Having said all that, Leibniz was on to something when he said a microscope and a telescope can see the same thing. If focussing down on the monads and the elements that make up life reveals increasing sophistication, then we have a system that is anti-reductionistic.

In the 1850's we thought that all matter was made of about 90 different atoms we called elements, and in the 1920's we thought that all atoms were made of 3 subatomic particles: protons, neutrons and electrons. This was as it should be, finer and finer microscopes were achieving greater and greater simplicity.

Then in the 1930's and 1940's the number of subatomic particles exploded to somewhere in excess of 100. One bewildered physicist, when he discovered the muon, an exceptionally overweight electron, asked "Who ordered that?" Reductionism had failed. (Today we are back down to 12 quarks, 12 leptons, 8 gluons, 3 electoweak-ons, and a Higgs, but it really isn't clear if the number is going down or up.)

The same story was true of life. In the 1800's we knew that all the varied forms of life on the planet were made of cells. Darwin thought cells were little bags of water and salts driven by diffusion and chemical gradients. This is what reductionism predicted.

But by 1900 we knew they had enzymes in them, and soon DNA and proteins and with electron microscopes we now we know them to be the farthest thing from bags of water, but nanofabrication factories of unbelievable complexity. Random diffusion plays almost no part of a cell's operation, but every important molecule has its own transporter. Reductionism failed.

So when Leibniz suggested that the details kept getting richer as one went to smaller scales, he was suggesting an anti-reductionism.

Now a fractal is just such a system, that shows the same detail at all levels of magnification. But when this happens, it reveals that there is a non-local, or a global property of the system. In physics, when we run into a problem that seems to make our calculations explode, say, finding the electric field of 1/r where r--> 0, we try to change coordinates to a more amenable integral, r--> 1/x for example. In other words, we attempt to turn our universe inside out. (The fancy name for this is "renormalization".) Leibniz is saying that microscopes and telescopes are interchangeable, that whether we look on the largest scales or the smallest scales, we see the same order and purpose. And if we are aware of ourselves being aware, if we are a recursive algorithm, then we are fractal in time. Then space-time is a true fractal. And if we live in a fractal world, then it says there is an order parameter, a global system bigger than any of us.

Well, the other characteristic of a physicist different from a mathematician is that he knows he must abandon an analogy somewhere, so I think I'll leave this one here.

Is it possible for a system to lack information in the details, but gain it in the action; to have little static knowledge but lots of dynamic; to have no information in the boundary conditions, in the initial state, or stored in special registers, but when the power is switched on, suddenly become Einstein?

This is the thesis of the Sante Fe Institute, of Stuart Kauffman's chosen vocation, for this is essentially what Darwin proposed: living things collect information just by being alive. They get smarter the way football jocks pass Algebra 1, just by being there.  Darwin called it natural selection, which doesn't actually explain anything anymore than Nietzche's "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is advice on picking mushrooms. But if you had to find a reason for this miracle of dynamic information emergence, you might be tempted to say that it is due to the system, it's designed for this, it's in the ground rules.

But is it? I mean, other than saying that this is the only explanation for the data, which is a bit of a tautology, how can we test whether or not it is in the rules of the game?

Well, in the past century, biologists have bred fruit flies, nematodes, flatworms and other nasty biological pests in an attempt to see how evolution works. We learned a lot about Mendellian genetics, but we haven't actually learned much about natural selection. Part of the problem is that even fruit flies with their 10 days per generation, in the 100 years of fly research there have been at most only 3650 generations to observe evolution. (Not enough! say the Darwinistas.)

Bacteria are bit faster at 20 minutes per generation, and have smaller genomes with sloppier genetic copying, so Richard Lenski proposed to see if Escherichia coli bacteria (common gut bacteria) could evolve the ability to digest a new material--citrate. After 20 years,  and 400,000+ generations, he claimed success.  Only it sorta needed some help, it wasn't exactly survival of the fittest, it looked more like devolution than evolution. And in fact, Michael Behe used wild malaria parasites as his test case for 100 years of evolution in the face of anti-malarial drugs, and sure enough, it was too slow to account for Darwin's magical dynamical emergence.

Well we could wait another 20 years for more results from Lenski, but if Behe is right, we would need millions of years to get anything interesting out of bacteria, and billions of years for fruit flies, and... you get the drift.  What is a thinking man to do?

Computer simulations!

(Reminds me of an old song, "you can get anything you want, at Alice's Internet cafe...")

Well there's no shortage of 30-somethings who want to make their mark on the world, and proving Darwin with a computer is just the ticket to fame and glory. So we have a dozen evolutionary simulations as sophisticated as the best big ticket shoot-em-up game, all cranking on government supercomputers to see how this emergence thing works. 

Not very well. At least, not as well as say, you and I operate, and supposedly we evolved from far less efficient wetware.

Gregory Chaitin, a famous mathematician and computer scientist employed at the IBM flagship Thomas J Watson Research Center (where I spent an enjoyable summer in 1981), has written extensively on information and complexity. He gets quoted favorably by Intelligent Design's resident mathematician--William Dembski. He's not naive about the problem emergence is supposed to solve. But he's embarrassed that the mathematics of evolution has, well, not evolved. Biologists are more scared of math today than 60 years ago when JBS "Jack" Haldane defined the field. So he decided that the problem with all those computer simulations is that they are trying to do too many things at once. On his web site, he proposes the following solution:

• 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth, 150th anniversary of The Origin of Species.
• The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics (Wigner) versus the lack of effectiveness of mathematics in biology (Gelfand).
• We wish to extract the fundamental mathematical ideas contained in biology.
• We wish to prove theorems about extremely simple unrealistic models, not run simulations of extremely complicated realistic models.
• Our goal is not to realistically simulate biological evolution, but to represent mathematically the fundamental biological principles of evolution in such a manner that we can prove that evolution must take place.
• This may be regarded as a toy model, but we do not see it as a toy, we see it as a way to eliminate inessential distractions that only serve to confuse the issues!
• Theories are lies that help us to see the truth (Picasso).
• Math is extremely single-minded and can only deal successfully with a single idea at a time (Jack: The Pernicious Influence of Mathematics on Science).
• If Darwin's theory of evolution is as fundamental, basic and general as most biologists think, then it must be possible to extract some basic mathematical ideas from it.
• Nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution (Dobzhansky).
• It is scandalous that we do not have a mathematical proof that evolution works!
• I am a pure mathematician, not a biologist: I am trying to find the Platonic ideal of evolution, the archetypical behavior, not the messy version that takes place in the real world!
• The aim is proofs, not realistic simulations.
• Another way our model differs from previous models: Our goal is to understand biological creativity and the major transitions in evolution, not gradual changes.
• Fisher-Wright population genetics studies changes in gene frequencies. We are trying to model how new genes arise, and major changes such as from single-celled to multi-cellular organisms.

But why is Chaitin feeling embarrassed now, after 60 years of bad biological mathematics? Because another mathematician said it couldn't be done. Here's Chaitin's own words,

Our random walk model was inspired by the stimulating critique of Darwinian evolution in D. Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion, Crown Forum, New York, 2008. See especially pp. 192-195. In a nutshell, model = Jack (digital software) + Berlinski (random walk) + Busy Beaver Problem. Our model is an attempt to answer Berlinski's criticisms.

Wow. An ID book having an impact! Who would have thunk it? (Maybe somebody should contact that judge over in Dover PA who said ID wasn't science.) So what will be Chaitin's modus operandi?

• I think this discussion makes a convincing case that a theory of the evolution of randomly mutating software is possible, and that random walks in software space are worth studying.
• How biologically relevant such a theory may be remains to be seen.
• But that it will be an interesting new field of mathematics is now plausible. However, carrying out this research will require a great deal of work. Maybe you would like to work on these problems?
• I propose calling this new field metabiology: I hope that it will eventually develop into a field parallel to biology, dealing with the random evolution of artificial software (computer programs) rather than natural software (DNA), and simple enough that it is possible to prove rigorous theorems or formulate heuristic arguments at the same high level of precision that is common in theoretical physics.
• Whether or not this happens, as the concepts of computation, information and complexity how, mathematics is moving in a biological direction. This trend will continue.

Let me summarize his modus operandi -- a hope and a prayer.

Chaitin quotes a famous mathematical physicist, Eugene Wigner, who pointed out that math works better than it should ("an unreasonable success") in the field of physics. In fact, physicists often don't wait for the mathematician to prove, say, that there exist solutions to the famous supersonic solar flow equations, they just assume the answer because they can see it. And Chaitin is asking, why can't this apply to biology? He tosses off all the excuses "too complicated", "different methodology" and says "look you guys, we had a good start with Jack, why didn't you finish the race?"

Well maybe the failure of 3 generations of mathematicians is because the problem is insoluble, or as they say in math "it is not a well-posed problem". Maybe there isn't any secret method of adding information dynamically. Maybe emergence is a myth. Maybe natural selection doesn't do anything to DNA and only affects the epigenetic response. Maybe Galapagos finch beaks have absolutely nothing to say about speciation and the origin of the species.

U of British Columbia Applied Mathematician, Richard Johns has submitted a paper quantifying the amount of information that supposedly emerges dynamically. It turns out to be a lot. And there are no short cuts by dividing the problem into stages, as the non-mathematical biologist Richard Dawkins suggests.

The late great irrascible mathematical physicist and confirmed atheist, Sir Fred Hoyle, used to propose the following test of emergence. Take a test tube, add some water, the amino acids and ingredients that supposedly produced life 4 billion years ago, but of course at much higher concentrations. Since chemical reactions go as the product of the concentrations, we can easily achieve chemical rates trillions of times above the dilute concentrations produced by the Miller-Urey method. Wait a few minutes, now examine the test tube for life. If life is as emergent as the Darwinists claim, it ought to be trivial to reproduce it in the lab. The fact that we don't see life, on the other hand, put stringent upper limits on the probability of emergence. What makes Hoyle so lovable, is that long before Dembski was talking about improbabilities, he went ahead and calculated all these numbers and published them in The Mathematics of Evolution (1987).

You would think Chaitin would pick a better-posed problem.

Michael Ruse is no friend of Intelligent Design. He famously defended methodological naturalism (MN) against Alvin Plantiga in print and in person, which is a very brave thing indeed. But his article in the Chronicle of Higher Education reveals a philosopher that desperately wants the purpose, order, design, and all the fruits of theism that MN resolutely denies. I didn't think I would like Ruse, but I liked this essay. (Read the whole thing.) It is asking all the right questions, though of course, without the freedom to answer them. I checked out his bio, and found that he was a British import, which explains his classical understanding. But like Richard Dawkins, it is proof that a classical education may bring a man to the river, but cannot make him drink.

Gaia in the Light of Modern Science

By Michael Ruse

For many years, I taught an introductory philosophy class based on Plato's Republic. It is a wonderful work through which to bring students to some of the crucial issues that engage and divide human beings—the nature of knowledge, the desirability of democracy, the place of women in society, mathematics, and God. Above all, there is the Theory of Forms, extrasensory entities that are supposed to inform and determine the objects in this world of sensation and experience. They are Plato's answer to the challenge posed by two earlier thinkers: Heraclitus, who claimed that everything changes ("You cannot step into the same river twice."), and Parmenides, who claimed that nothing changes ("How could what is perish? How could it have come to be?"). The Forms are timeless and yet manifest themselves in this physical world of corruption and decay.

After explaining how Plato solves the hoary philosophy problem of "the-one-and-the-many", aka Heraclitus vs. Parmenides, Ruse goes on to discuss the Gaia hypothesis that the Earth acts as a giant organism, maintaining its temperature and environment to keep it friendly to life. Getting too cold? Erupt a few volcanoes. Getting too hot? More clouds.

The problem with this theory, of course, is that it presupposes purpose. It looks like we are here because Gaia wanted us to be here. It undermines Darwin because it says we are not a cosmic accident, but the result of the larger purposes of Gaia.

Well, as you can imagine, that bothers Darwinists and Ruse, so he defends Gaia by arguing that the physics of the Earth conspire to "look like purpose". That carbon dioxide can't help but regulate climate. It's the darn physics that make everything look planned, not the biology! We've all heard that refrain before, not just in Darwin's "appearance of purpose", but all the way back to Lucretius' De Natura. So Ruse knows he's pulling an old ruse, and feels as if he has to defend his dissembling.

My sense is that Gaia has made an important contribution to our thinking about the planet, if only by virtue of the fact that it makes us think seriously about such issues as global warming and pollution of the oceans. As a historian and philosopher of science, I find that both Lovelock's theory and those of his critics inspire me to go back to the foundations of science and consider the root metaphors of empirical inquiry and why we prefer one set of models and ideas over another. It is true that as Gaia has been tamed (by Lovelock himself) into a more respectable notion in the light of modern science, it has lost some of its original dramatic appeal. No doubt those earnest Californians seeking spiritual backing for their enthusiasms will find other outlets.
As a Darwinian and a Heraclitean (and an ex-Quaker shunning his childhood roots), I confess that I am uncomfortable with balance and equilibrium, those Parmenidean conjectures. Although books like Ward's The Medea Hypothesis—so obviously written for the trade market, so selective in the evidence they use to make their case —make me no less uneasy. Perhaps in the end, Plato had it right: We need both perspectives, Heraclitean and Parmenidean, to get the whole picture. At our peril, and at our children's peril, we ignore the messages of those seminal Greek thinkers.

Poor Ruse! He can't shake off Plato, no matter how hard he tries. And of course, it was Augustine who made the argument that Plato is half-way to Christianity, and certainly nowhere near Democritean atheism. I don't know how Ruse manages to keep one foot on Democritean MN and the other foot on theistic Plato. 

One modern approach is to say that one cannot, that one has to do a Hegelian two-step: "Thesis (huff), antithesis (puff), Synthesis! (pant, pant). Again! Thesis (puff), antithesis, (huff) Synthesis!.." But the very focus on the dance rather than on the ground beneath reveals the weakness of the whole approach. You can dance your way equally well to Tipler's Omega Point or to Marx's hell. It really provides no standards, no signposts, no certainty. It no more solves the Greek dichotomy than Solomon's sword solved the problem of contested motherhood. Rather, the entire paradox should reveal that there is a third solution that subsumes both.

Here's what I wrote another prof:

I've written a bit on the organic vs machine view of nature, and how many physicists like Robert Jastrow and Paul Davies have noted that biologists are getting more machine-like, while physicists are getting more organic: QM vs Newton, for example. Look at the tables in this paper on these tendencies.

The discussion of homeostasis is also very interesting, because I've become convinced that recursion, or self-reference, is the hallmark of intelligent design. As Denyse can tell you, self-awareness is perhaps the gold standard of mind and consciousness, we will know we have achieved AI when a machine knows about itself. In theology, the hardest nut to crack is the hermeneutical circle, that you have to know what a text is about before you can understand a text. The MN equivalent in theology is assigning "meaning" to the origin and intent of a text. E.g., Moses didn't write the penteteuch, but 4 different sources, JEDP, wrote it with differing intentions. So the way to understand a text is to understand everything that came before it. But what happens when a text is writing about itself? What then does that do to our analysis? Can we capture a deterministic meaning, when the loop of interpretation includes us?

Let me say it another way. The "S" in CSI involves an awareness of itself. What makes CSI imply ID, is that only a "mind", only an "intelligent agent" can provide the specification that makes complex information useful to itself. One of the implications of "purpose" of "teleology" is that the intelligent agent is aware of what it is doing. If it is unaware of the consequences of its action, then "purpose" is either lacking or exists at an even higher plane that involves controlling the intelligent agent.

So what do we make of Ruse's comments about "daisyworld", a homeostatic environment that lacks purpose? His argument is that the "daisyworld" isn't aware of itself, and that there is no designer above daisyworld that is aware of itself.

But if CO2 is just homeostatic by physics so that Gaia is just naturally homeostatic, then why did CO2 cause Venus to have runaway greenhouse warming and cook, whereas CO2 is far more benign on Earth? Ruse would say that it proves how random and unpurposeful homeostasis is. A Christian would say, even Gaia was designed by a more intelligent agent. No, I'm not advocating Sol as the King of the Planetary Gods! For this recursion could go on forever--"whom does Sol obey?" How does one terminate this endless chain, this gnostic hierarchy of greater and greater intelligences?

Recursion is both the key and the riddle.

I'm trying to write a thesis on recursion, but I keep thinking about it and don't know where to start.

I've also resolved to stop procrastinating, tomorrow.

All these sentences are false because all generalizations are false.

Once you are sensitized to the issue of recursion, you will know it must be divine to be so ubiquitous. Which is another reason it is hard to start the thesis, everything seems to entail recursion.

For example, suppose there's a El Nino combined with a decadal oscillation that produces 10 years of warm winters. It's not in anyone's climate model, so at meteorology meetings everyone talks about this anomaly. Someone comes up with a neat solution, feedback in the greenhouse gas radiation module. Soon everyone has that fix in their model. Is it right? Well, everyone's models are in complete agreement, and it matches the current climate, so it has to be right. Lots of funding is poured into this solution. Then the El Nino gives way to a La Nina, and the climate cools. It is not in anyone's model. Someone comes up with a neat solution, aerosols are heating the Arctic. Is it right? Of course not, no one has it in their model. And besides, too much money is invested in the other solution. Science is a finite state machine which has locked into a "global warming" solution that can hardly be changed.

The problem with the scientific method, like the problem with anything humans get involved in, is that we can foresee the result and accommodate our behavior accordingly. Our predictions are contained in our assumptions. In other words, we apply feedback or recursion into the science. Once this is done, and there is no way to really avoid it, we no longer have a deterministic system. Without a deterministic system, science is not deductive, it isn't even very inductive, because it isn't reductive; it is creative. We create a reality which didn't exist before, so we can neither deduce it nor induce it. Science is part of the system that we are describing, and we cannot objectively remove ourselves from the endeavor. And until science admits that it is a social endeavor and employs the same sort of checks and balances that apply to other human organizations, it will forever be mislead by the same people who lead it.

Let's see how this works in biology, more specifically, in the Evolution versus Intelligent Design debate. Jerry Coyne is an ardent evolutionist who argues that all the science support him and undermine his enemies. Here is his argument:

I have little to add to what P.Z. said except to note that the argument from imperfection — i.e., organisms show imperfections of “design” that constitute evidence for evolution — is not a theological argument, but a scientific one.  The reason why the recurrent laryngeal nerve, for example, makes a big detour around the aorta before attaching to the larynx is perfectly understandable by evolution (the nerve and artery used to line up, but the artery evolved backwards, constraining the nerve to move with it), but makes no sense under the idea of special creation — unless, that is, you believe that the creator designed things to make them look as if they evolved.  No form of creationism/intelligent design can explain these imperfections, but they all, as Dobzhansky said, “make sense in the light of evolution.”

Cornelius Hunter is all over this (lack of) logic. Let me add something I'm sure Drs Myers and Coyne will undoubtedly recognize--Bayesian hypothesis testing. The quality of a theory, according to Bayes, is more than whether an experimental result was predicted by the theory, but rather is defined as the "Occam factor", the experimental measurement (with error bars), divided by the space of the prediction (highest minus lowest prediction). If a theory is consistent with any measurement, as Karl Popper famously said of Freud, then it is a pretty useless theory for it is unfalsifiable. Bayes would say it had a very small Occam factor.

Now Coyne says that if an organism has a bad design, it is consistent with evolution, and of course if it has a good design, it is consistent with evolution. Evolution is consistent with any design, but not ID, which specifically mentions design. According Coyne, God would never make something with a bad design, which says Coyne, is not a theological argument(!). Whether or not it is a statement about the God Coyne doesn't believe in, it still seems to me that it is a Bayesian argument. Coyne just admitted that ID is a better theory than evolution, because ID is falsifiable, as he futilely attempts to prove.

Cornelius points all this out in his blog, which is another failed attempt to convince Coyne that he is as religiously dogmatic as the straw men he skewers. But Cornelius is puzzled by one thing, the brazenness of Professors Coyne and Myers that make these illogical arguments as if they were perfectly obvious. Are they playing the fool, or playing us for fools? (This is the Procrustes Dilemma: incompetence or malice?)

I think the answer is both. Or more precisely, recursion. Like global warming, once the fix is in, then the system produces feedback that makes it impossible to get any other answer. Once Coyne has said that he is an atheist, then it is impossible for him to be religious about his atheism. Just as it is impossible for a woman to be a chauvinist, or an African-American to be a racist. If Coyne were to admit that he is recursively trapped, he would have to admit that something very basic, something very fundamental in his worldview, is wrong. Thomas Kuhn called these things "paradigm shifts", and seemed to think that one couldn't be gradually talked into or out-of a paradigm. Instead, there was a "conversion experience" as one moved from one paradigm to the other. Despite the analogy, these quantum jumps have no physical basis (unlike real electron quantum jumps), and merely reveal something about the human brain, something about consciousness, something about ourselves. And that something is feedback.

Feedback is why we polarize into opposing camps. Feedback is why we can't be objective. Feedback is why global warming is such a big topic in a frigid year. Feedback is why Science is doomed. Feedback is why the human race is damned. For there are many ancient theological terms for feedback--rebellion, sin, pride, conceit--and it was this feedback in that garden so long ago, that introduced the human race to this strange condition called original sin. What starts out as incompetence rapidly turns into malice. And so malice propagates from heaven to earth and from past to future. Perhaps, in some theological sense, eternity will have no incompetence, only malice.

Which is why there is but one cure for recursion, for science, for history, for man: love.

I struggle with a Gedankenexeperiment for years, because no one could really answer to the following: (Let me remark that I personally think artificial consciousness is not possible, but I believe this for strict theological reason only, not because of scientific ones; so I am a carbon based chauvinist, see below)

As we know, biological neurons (carbon based) can be simulated by (silicon based) artificial ones (I give lectures in neural nets and we do this all the time). I heard from a surgery, where parts of a human brain were damaged by an accident and some of the parts were substituted by artificial neuron circuits (silicon based). This brought me to the following:
Imagine, that step by step every neuron and its attachments are replaced by an artificial, silicon based neural circuit with the same function. One at a time. Let’s give every substitution a natural number 1, 2, 3 etc.; now come the crucial questions:

1. At which exact number “n” is the consciousness not longer “real” but “only” a simulation?
2. Assumed further that all natural neurons are replaced by artificial ones –then we have an artificial brain which might behave exactly like the former biological one- can we say (with good consciousness) that the new person has no longer a consciousness?

The same Gedankenexperiment can be made concerning the question of the soul:
3. At which exact number “n” is the soul not longer there (since we assume that machines can not have a soul)?

Has anybody a good explanation for “carbon over silicon”?? Or is God not restricted to "distribute" a soul only to carbon-based entities?

There are a few assumptions in your gedankenexperiment that need to be teased out.

a) Expanding on Richard Gonzalez's comment, Roger Penrose thinks that consciousness is a non-local phenomena where QM weirdness interacts with brain cell components based on their compactness. He likes to pin the connection between material structure and QM consciousness on the microfibrils that give the cell structure. So your silicon would lack this QM feature and therefore would be incapable of replacing brain cells. So Gonzalez and Penrose have identified different reasons but the same conclusion that silicon could never in principle replace carbon.

b) [Another physicist] sees consciousness as a dynamic thing, sort of like a candle flame. Suppose we don't understand fire, and can't relight the candle, but we are sure we could do a better job than using carbon-based wax. Replacing all the wax in a candle with silicone might give the same mechanical properties, but how would insure that the flame is still lit? So there are a whole raft of problems in substituting silicon for carbon while insuring that the flame doesn't go out. Maybe it isn't possible.

c) Suppose that the brain is not a linear computer, but a holographic computer. That is, the neuron we are replacing doesn't just directly control the index finger, but also remembers when Aunt Mathilda hit my knuckles so hard my fingers hurt, as well as the trill in Bach's 2-part invention. How can I design a substitute neuron, when I need to know everything in the brain to replace one part? I have to have the answer to consciousness before I can substitute one piece of that consciousness.

d) Suppose that the brain is aware of itself. So that when you insert your silicon connection, the remainder of the brain cells take a vote whether to include that circuit in their consciousness. Oh they are happy to give the silicon menial tasks like moving muscle cells, but would never allow it to take part in the alpha-wave community of consciousness.

I guess I'm trying to say that reductionism is built into your model, where you assume consciousness is some sort of collective state of individually unconscious elements. But turn your assumptions inside out. Maybe your brain is the collective stupidity of holding a democratic vote among highly individual opinionated cells. Or my current favorite analogy, perhaps consciousness is fractal, looking the same whether viewed reductively or constructively: the hologram contains as much information as the image, the spatial and its Fourier-transform have the same amount of information.

Is there good reason to believe that physics cannot be, at least in theory, reduced to an algorithm? As far as I know, it is a discrete system guided by deterministic and stochastic processes, both of which can be represented by Turing machines.

Note, I'm not asking whether we actually *are* in a computer simulation, rather merely whether there is any logical distinction between the two. If not, then no matter what kind of matter a human body is built out of, it's behavior can be reduced to AI.

Yes! Turing himself discussed this problem. If the system has a feedback loop, then de facto, it cannot be reduced to an algorithm. Or conversely, the algorithm cannot predict the output. Right away, there are numerous things that serve as feedback loops. Consciousness and self-awareness is the acme of feedback. In addition, much of "emergent phenomena" that physics likes to talk about is feedback related. Scale-invariance, for example, leads to feedback between vastly different spatial scales. QM weirdness (collapse of wavefunction) is a sort of temporal feedback mechanism. Then there are feedbacks on first derivatives--viscosity for example, where it depends on velocity. These are normally called non-linear effects, and they are responsible for chaos in the solutions. But the key point is that they make algorithmic determinism impossible.

So yes, you can reduce Physics to algorithms, but then you won't know what the answer is. And as far as AI is concerned, you can do algorithms till you turn blue, but in the end you will have replicated Artificial Ignorance, which is fun, but not what was advertised.

Given all the evil things I've said about the Enlightenment, the title might be a bit baffling. A UPenn student was so plastered with references to it, he referred to it as the "Endarkenment". So what useful purpose is served in trying to find good things about the rejection of God and the rise of atheism?

Well first of all, all of history is in the hands of almighty God. So if He brought the Enlightenment to Christianized Europe, there must have been a good reason. If we can find the good in it, perhaps we can also begin to understand the evil in it as well, and properly sift the treasure from the trash. This piece is the result of a lively discussion with my 18-yr old, while driving the 850 miles from her grandparents house.

At the intersection of several sidewalks in the center of the UPenn campus is a mosaic of compass directions. Rumor has it that stepping on the compass will ensure failure on your next test, so that students meticulously avoid its evil eye. Cameron, a feisty Orthodox boy, calls it all wicked superstition, and takes pains to plant a foot firmly on it at every occasion. It seems obvious to him that this is that sort of thing, but what is his criteria?

Suppose for a moment that it isn't all superstition, but an evil graduate student has buried a Cobalt-60 source there that will irradiate your foot, and give you radiation sickness in 24 hours that looks a lot like a bad cold, and of course, interferes with your test-taking. Then there might actually be a scientific reason for this rumor. How can one tell the difference between superstition and experimental science?

At the end of the high middle ages there were a lot of rumors and superstitions as well as new science, and Europeans had to find a path through the weeds to establish the new field of science. Perhaps then, the Enlightenment was the result of extending the Reformation method of distinguishing the good theology from the bad theology, but now applied to nature. In that case, it was not so much an Endarkenment of the spiritual revolution begun by the Reformation that made it atheistic, but a failure of the Enlightenment to understand its derivative roots, its parasitical dependence on Reformation metaphysics. In that case, it was the arrogance of material success that was the Enlightenment's spiritual undoing. If so, then we don't have to discard the progress of the Enlightenment in order to correct it, rather we have to counter-act the overconfidence that led us into two centuries of atheism. History, then, is not what Franky Schaeffer presented in "How then shall we live?" movie as a series of reversals, but rather a helical spiral that may go over the same ground but at ever increasing altitude.

Therefore let us consider what was truly remarkable about the Enlightenment dismissal of superstition as a method of explanation, before we circle back and discuss what was lost.

The main point is that superstition kills science. The late Stanley Jaki wrote extensively on what made the Europeans discover Science, and not the Caliphate, the Greeks, the Babylonians and the Chinese before them. Why is it that the Chinese invented gunpowder and compasses but didn't invent muskets and global navigation? Why is it that the Babylonians could predict eclipses and divide the heavens by degree, but never started mathematics? Or why did the Greeks know the earth was round and had a circumference of 25000 miles, but never discovered America? Or why did the Muslims invent distillation and use kerosene to defend against seige towers, but never founded chemistry? 

Jaki gives the answer. They didn't have the metaphysics for science. One needed an assurance that laws were unchanging, and that laws were discoverable. In religious terms, a law is a permanent aspect of God, what Reformed theologians call a covenant. (See Poythress' book "Redeeming Science".) On the other hand, one must also think that God's attributes are comprehensible. God must be transcendently unchanging, yet immanently understandable. Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner referred to it as the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences."  Babylon had a polytheism that made the laws accessible, but also variable, personal, and arbitrary. Islam had a monotheism that made the laws unchanging, but also distant, transcendent, and unknowable. Only Christianity had the right mix of the transcendent God who became Emmanuel, God with us.

But Christianity didn't appear in a vacuum. Metaphysics didn't come on two tablets of stone. Rather, centuries of Christian teaching slowly changed the way in which men viewed the world until finally all the ingredients were present for the birth of science. The Reformation in the 16th century, and the Enlightenment in the 17th mark a one-two punch that provided the knockout blow to a superstitious, anti-scientific world view.  What was the hurdle that stopped Medievals from developing science? Broadly speaking, superstition.

The attitude that both monotheists and polytheists share is an arbitrary view of law. For the monotheist, God can do whatever he wants, he has no limits, and therefore there can be no explaining his actions in a coherent way. For the polytheist, there is a rational aspect to the god's actions, but they are always struggling with each other for primacy, so that one never knows which law will be applicable in this instance. The irrationality of the gods is ever-present, masking their rationality. The net result is that neither the rigid monotheist nor the flexible polytheist has any incentive to uncover unchanging laws of nature. Worse than that, they had a very attractive substitute, an enticing counterfeit: superstition.

       Incommensurate cause and effect
As I said to my 18yr old on that trip, let's ask why Cameron knew that the rumor of the compass was superstition rather than science. The first thing I noticed was the lack of equality between cause and effect. If I step on something nasty, I expect to hurt my foot, make me limp, or slip and hit my head. I don't expect that in the next 24 hours my mental abilities will be degraded unwittingly on a test. Now drinking something nasty might do that to my thinking abilities, but in a general, unspecific fashion. Yet here we are told that something I step on was going to subtly sabotage my memory.  It doesn't seem commensurate.

Now as an alternative explanation above, I suggested a multistep process that might have this effect, but notice that it is a chain of causes. The characteristic of superstition is that it has no intermediate steps. "Step on a crack, break your mother's back!" my elementary school classmates chanted, without the slightest concern for a chain of causation. So what makes superstition attractive, is its simplicity. It doesn't require multiple steps. It doesn't insist on logical reasoning. It can appeal to small children as much as adults. But when an adult skips steps, he is being lazy, arguing in a childlike manner. The attractiveness of superstition and also its principle failure, is childishness.

But also note what this same simplicity says about God, about Nature, about other humans. It says that just as a child cannot explain adult behavior, so Nature and God have inexplicable behavior. It projects the childlike irrationality upon the Universe, which if one were still a child, would be understandable. But when an adult assumes other adults are acting in a childlike way, he is demeaning them, or possibly demeaning himself. There is a deep immaturity when we mature yet expect that God and the Universe will not.

          Blameshifting
There is another more subtle effect for much superstition: the desire to avoid blame. I spent a summer in Haiti, and discovered how this works. When a young man took a turn too fast in his car, and careened into a roadside stand striking an old woman, his defence was Voodoo--someone had put a hex on him. So also when one blames a poor test grade on the curse of the campus compass, there is a strong element of blameshifting. And the destiny of blameshifting can be worse than the character in CS Lewis' "The Great Divorce" who preferred the selfishness of his hell to the responsibility of heaven, for it is possible to achieve hell on earth with an ultimate abdication of all blame and all personality. Superstition makes an idol in the hope that it will excuse, but in the end it will only consume.

            Idolatry
That idols eat us up is the stuff of all tragedies. The very thing we avoid is that which destroys us. When we insulate ourselves with money, be it luxuries, IRAs, or medical insurance, it is that same money that destroys our families, our retirements, and our health. "Health insurance" my wife always reminds me, "is not health."  So it is whenever we make idols of what should remain means. And superstition is the first step of idolatry, an irrational belief in the efficaciousness of some action.

For superstition is not just unwarranted belief in causation--that thunder causes milk to curdle--it is an implied command that if we do not want our milk to curdle we must shelter it from thunder. That is, superstition requires some personal action on our part. It is a personalization of the Universe, that our actions are part of the laws of nature. If stepping on a crack will break my mother's back, then cautiously avoiding all cracks will force the Universe to respect my personal attention.

Metaphysics

We can look at these aspects of superstition and recognize that they obviously deviate from the laws of science, but it was not so obvious 400 years ago. For every other religion in the world holds to one of these views. Islam's fierce monotheism makes God the transcendent parent to our immanent child, so that childishness in Science is praised, rather than condemned. Likewise, blameshifting is the essential nature of polytheism, while the personalization of Nature is inseparable from pantheism.

Thus the Reformation insistence on abandoning tradition for the revealed word was the necessary precursor to the Enlightenment insistence on abandoning superstition for the scientific law. Such was the poison of counterfeit science that all traces of it had to be expunged before real progress could be made. This then was the benefit of the 17th century, and led directly to the rise of the West.

The Endarkenment came in the next century, paradoxically the most Christian 19th century as some of the weeds of the Reformation bore fruit.

Last Saturday, July 4th, I attended a "tea party" in Huntsville, and thought I would write a short summary of my observations. As you might know, a grass-roots movement has sprung up around America objecting to the truly unimaginable spending spree that our current congress and president has embarked upon. These objections have crystallized in locally organized political rallies called "tea parties" in honor of the original Boston Tea Party 236 years ago.

The Huntsville Tea Party (HTP) was scheduled for 7 pm adjacent to the baseball stadium where the fireworks would be set off at 9pm. So we piled the kids, blankets and some folding chairs in the car and drove to the site. A well organized parking committee was directing us to park in rows at the fairgrounds, and we gathered our stuff and hiked over to the concession stands and platform that had been hung with banners. Some Revolutionary War-era flags were flying, including the "Don't Tread on Me" yellow flag, which along with some tri-corner hats, gave a nice touch to the rally. Placards were out, and someone was handing out "fair-tax" pamphlets.

I found a clear spot and set up my chairs. A backup rock band was warming up the crowd. Lots of other people were setting up their chairs, and I estimated 1500 people. The MC gave an estimate of 3000-5000 later in the evening, perhaps he could see more than I. After a half-hour, the Boy Scouts paraded in with the American flag and led us in the Pledge of Allegiance. Then the main speaker got up and introduced the topic and several local politicians as well as some also-rans. As far as I could tell, all the politicians were Republicans, though the crowd meticulously avoided labels for either party.

The speeches were a little short of inspirational, but revealed a bubbling anger over taxation, socialized medicine, and eminent domain actions of the city. But underneath this resentment was an unspoken fear. When speakers mentioned "freedom", there was a feeling that they actually were afraid of losing it. Some of the speakers tried to work the crowd, but it was clear that they were new to the game and not yet proficient. There was an attempt at diversity, with a Jamaican and an Afro-American among the dozen on the platform. A Russian talked about the effects of socialized medicine in his own country. Of course the speeches went on past the 9pm closing, so the fireworks display behind distracted me from the last 2 speeches.

If I were a Democratic president or congressman, this tea party would not lose any sleep. No one captured the audience the way a good demagogue should. The anger that brought them was still a disorganized, raw emotion, and no greater clarity was obtained at the meeting. The number who came, while significant and building solidarity was still a mere 1-2% of the 150,000 in the city. Even the quality of the speakers indicated that little if any professional organization was involved.

But for a Republican, the tea party should cause sleepless nights. For the lack of direction was evident in the various placards displayed. Some wanted to get rid of the IRS, others feared socialized medicine. Still others hated the corruption of the Democratic party and its president. A few mentioned the importance of freedom. But none had a plan. Oh sure, the fair tax contingent was well-organized and had detailed plans for everything except politics, and in fact, seemed to think that their plan was a-political. But at the bottom, "toss the bums out" is not really much of a plan, anymore than it would be a plan on the Titanic. Nor is the paeon to freedom much of a solution either, seeing the Orwellian sloganeering to which freedom has been subjected.

No one wanted to take the blame for the current unhappy state of affairs. Lots of blame shifting. Lots of anger. No calm assessments of the situation. None of the politicians wanted to project 3 or 7 years into the future, as if they were too afraid to state the obvious consequences of our present course.

At my Wednesday morning "men's bible study" I took an informal poll of those that attended the tea party. To my surprise, I was the only one. Now this is a church where one of the elders had just run for a Congressional seat and been narrowly defeated by a Democrat. One would have thought that the collection of businessmen, retired engineers, managers, doctors and lawyers that attend would be actively involved in politics. But if they were, they didn't show it. And indeed, despite running rather aggressive radio ads, our candidate was never mentioned by name in either sermons or corporate prayers or announcements.

"Maybe it's fear of the IRS" I opined to a fellow at my table. "But whatever it is, we are responsible for the current mess in Washington. For too long we have loved our income, our IRA's, our security more than our freedom."

"Do you know what I fear more than our loss of liberty?" my friend replied.

"Nuclear war?" I guessed.

"Worse." he said. "Civil war."

"I don't see it", I said. "I think we'd have to deserve a lot more punishment before this country descends to that. We'd have to ignore the whole reason for the current state of affairs. We'd have to earn God's disfavor by actively rejecting His discipline."

My wife put it more simply. "We need to repent."

My dad used to recite an old doggerel about 19th century Boston:

And here's to good old Boston
The land of the bean and the cod
Where Lowells talk only to Cabots
And Cabots talk only to God.

But it could easily have been written about the sciences:

And here's to graybearded physics,
the greek trade in -inos and -ons
where astros talk only to cosmos
and cosmos the pantheon.

Once upon a time, nearly every physicist had a right to talk about God, or perhaps, the limitations of God. Newton the opticker spent 10 years writing commentaries on Revelation. Maxwell the electromagnetician gave lectures on the matter God created. But in recent years, the mantle of high priesthood has fallen on cosmologists, who bear their responsibility gravely.
 
I will never forget the 1992 cover of Scientific American showing a photograph of the Doppler shift in the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) taken with NASA's COBE satellite that George Smoot had entitled "The Face of God".  At first I groaned, thinking that he was pulling a bad PR stunt. Then I got upset, thinking he was criticizing Christianity. Now I feel pity, because I think he was serious. That is the face of his god--a cold, inscrutable, empty gaze that he poured 30 years of his life achieving. His 2006 award of the Nobel prize for this picture makes me even sadder, thinking of the thousands whom he has converted.

What is it about Cosmology that makes it the high priest of physics? Why are most cosmologists so eager to hypothesize about God, the Universe, and Theories of Everything? (Richard Feynman viewed it as a curse afflicting physicists in middle age.)

It probably has to do with beginnings. Every religion has its stories of beginnings that explain "Why Things Are The Way They Are", and cosmologists feel the heavy burden of explaining "The Real Nature of the Universe"  in their airy tales, for night skies aflame with stars and primeval world beginnings have always been intertwined. The Psalmist writes "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims His handiwork." St Paul writes, "For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made."

It is just that today's cosmologists seem to have lost all faith. The late Stanley Jaki took them to task in his book "God and the Cosmologists" for having mangled their science solely to reject their God. For example, the ancient Greek idea of a universe of eternal atoms was constructed in 500BC simply to avoid the necessity of a Creation and a Creator God. For 2000 years such a view was ridiculed, not only because it was atheistic, but also because it could not explain the data. As Heinrich Olbers pointed out, if there are an infinite number of stars in the sky, and an infinite time to observe them, the night sky should be white, not black. Likewise, as Isaac Newton understood perfectly, even if there be only two stars in the sky but an infinite time for gravity to work, they should have all clumped together by now.

These are listed in the textbooks as "paradoxes", which suggest that rather than being taken as support for a beginning, they are taken as removing support for the obvious solution of an eternal cosmos. This is exceeding strange, for over the past 4000 years, godless "eternal" creation myths have dominated less than 10% of the time.

Nevertheless, it was a big shock when the discovery of the CMBR in 1962 destroyed all hope for an eternal "steady-state" universe, and cosmologists grudgingly admitted a beginning to space and time. Robert Jastrow's book "God and the Astronomers" chronicles this upsetting period in modern cosmology.

But the atheist need not have worried. Forty years of theoreticians have gone to work to recover the eternal (and therefore atheist) universe. Two theories that collide and morph continuously like clashing armies in the night (or is that M-branes in higher dimensions?) are Andrei Linde's "multiverse" of Big Bangs occurring everywhere and continuously, and Lee Smolin's "landscape" of 10^500 ways for string theory to roll up.

The peculiar thing about "landscapes" and "multiverses" is that by definition they are impossible to observe. Like debates about "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin", these are proxy wars of metaphysics, these are creation myths that cannot be either proven or disproven. And this fragile state of the myth has led to heated debates between Smolin and Susskind over whose unprovable theory is superior.

This debate would be a yawner were not the scientists, in their eagerness to prove their point, grasping at the weapons of theology and philosophy. So it was with interest that I read Lee Smolin's argument why a timeless _meta-universe makes no sense. That is, Linde's multiverses pop up from somewhere, and likewise a string landscape has to have a location, which turns out be be a "_meta-place" without time or physics or dreams so various, so beautiful, so new,  but only some sort of mathematical Platonic austere existence. And guess who Smolin blames for this state of affairs?

The separation [by Newton] of scientific explanation into law and initial conditions leads to one of the most universal and powerful notions in physics — the notion of configuration space. This is the space of all possible configurations, or states, of the system. In classical and quantum physics we assume that this space exists a priori and outside of time, and that it can be studied independently of the laws of motion. These laws then specify the rules for how the point that describes the initial conditions in configuration space evolves in time. We call this the Newtonian schema for explanation.

And what is Smolin's evaluation of Newton?

The Newtonian schema is the basis for the claim that time is not fundamental in cosmology....This argument is faulty for two reasons....By discarding the Newtonian schema for cosmology and dispensing with the notion of the multiverse, we also no longer have any reason to suspect that time is an illusion.

But now Smolin has a different problem. Rejecting Plato's eternal realm brings us back to Aristotle's inductive science and Lessing's Ditch. Here's Smolin's take:

This alternative metaphysical framework has im­plications for the nature of physical law. Since nothing is true or real outside of time, there is no possibility of speaking of eternal laws. Laws are regularities that we discover hold for very long stretches of time, but there is no reason for laws to be true timelessly — indeed, there is no way to make sense of that notion. This opens the door to the possibility that laws evolve in time,...

Well I'm all for making time real, but I'm also all for universal laws. Is it really true that we can have one or the other but not both? Smolin seems to be ditching Kant for Hegel, he's abandoning Parmenides for Heraclitus. As I mentioned earlier, we keep rehashing the one-and-the-many problem, this time in cosmology. But the worrisome part for modernists raised on the concept of absolute truth, is that Smolin is drifting off into pantheism, where god is truth, and truth is the universe, and the universe is evolving, so god is evolving.

Leonard Susskind isn't ready to give up on either absolute truth or Newton, or for that matter on Darwin either. He credits both of them for having solved this serious metaphysical problem. In his response to Smolin he writes,

Darwin was not particularly interested in astronomy or physics, yet his impact on cosmology was enormous but in a way subconscious. In successfully explaining the origin of species, he eliminated superstition and set a new standard for what an explanation of nature should be like. As I wrote in my book The Black Hole War (Little Brown, 2008), Darwin’s masterstroke was to have “ejected God from the science of life”. True, Darwin was not the first scientist to cast out supernatural beliefs. Two centuries earlier, Newton — another great Cambridge scientist — had done so more than anyone before his own time...
In other words, before Darwin, even the greatest physicists had little alternative to a supernatural explanation of the origin of life, and therefore of nature itself. It was the success of Darwinism that forced the issue and set the standard for future theories of origins, whether it be it of life or of the universe. Explanations must be based on the laws of physics, mathematics and probability — and not on the hand of God.

It seems odd that Susskind is crediting a scientist for proving a metaphysical belief, as if Darwin provided some sort of evidence of the spontaneous origin of life. But notice what Susskind replaces God with--physics, math and more math. And as he explains, the "physics" of choice is string-theory, which many have called pure mathematics with no experimental basis or proof. So as Smolin warned in his earlier exchange, Susskind's timeless multiverse landscape is all math. What then is Susskind's bottom-line defense against Smolin?

Whether string theory with its huge landscape, and eternal inflation with its reproducing pockets of space, will prove to be correct is for the future to decide. What is true is that as of the present time, they provide the only natural explanation of the universe that lives up to the standard set by Darwin.

So there you have it. If you don't want to be a Christian pantheist, you'd better side with Susskind. What better proof of cosmology do you need?

Alas, neither is appealing to me.  As Jaki was always quick to say, neither the atheism of Greece nor the pantheism of India produced the science of the Enlightenment. Rather, the metaphysics of a Christian God who can be both transcendent and immanent, both absolute and particular, both promise-keeping and prayer-answering, both eternal and temporal, is necessary for cosmology to exist. Smolin and Susskind alike are squandering their borrowed capital, and the more they display their riches, the clearer their paupery appears.

Below is an essay that my now favorite religious scholar wrote.
"Is Immortality Important?" by Karen Armstrong.

Now I have read Armstrong, and understand, I think, why you like her writing. She is very clear and includes much learning from other major religions. She does a good job trying to find the common threads in all of them.

But as you well know, all generalizations are false. This is especially true as she shifts from her personal recollections of Roman Catholicism into a general description of these other religions. The parts of RCC she dislikes are very particular, localized, and not typical of the broader church teaching, whereas what she likes about other religions are broad, general features which are in direct conflict with the particulars of Hinduism or Buddhism or Confucianism.

That is if I were to go into the street, interviewing Buddhist monks, Hindu brahmins, Muslim imams, Confucian scholars, I would find two handfuls of anecdotes every bit as objectionable as her stories about first Friday masses. My Sri Lankan friend tells me of the superstition and witchcraft practised by their Buddhist country. My Brahmin Indian student tells me of the dangers of Hindu meditation. My wife tells me of the cruelty of Confucian duty in a Korean family. My Zoroastrian friend (Iranian wife of a German physicist) told me of the persecution endured in Iran. And as for Islam, let me direct you to the Middle East quarterly that asks whether Christianity and Judaism are as equally violent as Karen Armstrong maintains?

So do we judge a religion by the writings of its most learned sages, or by the practices of the majority of its adherents? A case can be made for both. But under either method of evaluation, Christianity uniquely stands out. (I could say Judaeo-Christian to be more inclusive, but given the 12 million or so practising Jews in the world, it doesn't merit "major religion" status.)

The only way to make Christianity look equally bad, is to compare its anecdotal, particular, uneducated folk practices with the textbook, generalized, non-specific philosophers of other major religions, which is what Karen Armstrong does. It isn't an apples-to-apples comparison, as if Pat Robertson is on a par with Lao Tzu, or with the rich, educated, prince Buddha, or the royal philosopher Confucius. But even though it is an unfair comparison, I would argue that she still had to cherry-pick to get an unfavorable comparison. The point being that Robertson is still a "good" man, an honest man, a man you can do business with, whereas none of that would be true of Buddha or Confucius. To say it another way, familiarity breeds contempt, and we condemn our brother for the splinter in his eye, yet admire the foreigner with a log in his. I have no doubt that were you able to interview Buddha in the flesh, you would be treated far worse than you expected, whereas the opposite would be true for interviewing Robertson.

Okay, let me address the proper comparisons.

a) Folk religion

How do the folk religions of Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity stack up? Let's make the assumption that income is correlated in some way to work ethic and general morals. Christianity wins that one hands down, though only in the past 3 centuries. Before that Taoism and Confucianism reigned supreme for 10 centuries. So that may be an unfair comparison. But perhaps diachronic or historical comparisons are complex, perhaps one could ask, how do two very close societies that convert to different religions fare? Singapore and Kualalumpur for example? Christianity wins again. There are lots of reasons for this, one of the better books I read on the subject was Rodney Stark, who preceded the book with this essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education (reprinted here)

We could look for other comparisons: child survival rates; attitudes toward the disabled or retarded or elderly; elderly survival rates; support for the arts and literature; development of science; military-civilian discipline. These are all characteristics of the non-professionally religious who make up the majority of any major religion. And once again, Christianity comes out on top, especially in the sanctity of human life category. For when life is sacred, then the investment in life reaches it maximum potential.

b) Professional religious philosophers

Here I will part company with Armstrong. All the things about Christianity that Armstrong likes are actually heresies of the Christian church, and much more aligned with what I would call the Bronze Age religion. I have a lengthy blog on the subject,  in which I contrast some of the characteristics of pre-Jewish Bronze Age religions.

The truly remarkable fact is that atheism has been so dominant in the past 100 years. This has almost never been the case in the history of the world, for the simple reason that historically atheists have been the most despised religion of all, fit only for thieves and murderers. (Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao ...) But what has been the most common religion is what I call homeostasis, the maintenance of cultural survival. From Gilgamesh to Hitler's 3rd Reich, the production of the right kind of babies has always been central to homeostasis. Any religion that advocates birth control and abortion will de facto, not be around for very long.

Imagine that culture is a living beast with a lifetime of centuries, and that you and I are merely transient red blood cells that are born in the marrow, fulfill our duty in the veins, and get recycled in the liver. How then does one red cell pass on this knowledge to the next crop of cells? By talking of a life external and eternal to our short lives.

In just such a way eschatology points to something bigger than ourselves, for whose purpose we were created, and whose duty brings fulfilment, and whose existence subsumes ours. Then Karen Armstrong's seething against "spiteful fantasies" of the afterlife misunderstands everything important about eschatology. Her search for "enlightenment of nirvana" becomes just another selfish attempt to attain a private eschatology. There is no escaping the accusation of selfishness unless there is a recognition of something greater than ourselves, something more eternal than ourselves, something that will continue upon our death. In other words, the very thing she condemns as selfish is the only thing that can rescue us from a selfish, self-absorbed destiny.

Like GWF Hegel, like process theology, like Hindu and Buddhism, like Bronze Age religion, she is putting a lot of sugar-coated philosophical god-talk on a central core of selfish, homeostatic religion. Conversely, no matter how legalistic, uneducated, childish, or primitive it may have been presented, an eternal destiny is the only escape from a selfish absorption with our own existence. Pantheism and polytheism are alike in their need for self-importance and the focus on the now. Which is probably why Islam was so successful in conquering the polytheistic Arabs and Hindus, but failed with the Christians.

And I haven't even gotten to the unique message of Christianity, that which separates it from the absolutist monotheism of Islam and Atheism that which Armstrong rejected along with her vows. But that would take me far beyond Armstrong's thesis.

In responding to an email about "front-loading" as a Deistic solution to the universe that does not require an interventionist (theist) God, I replied that I have some philosophical problems with the phrase "front-loading". It is a concession to Deism that doesn't have to be made. Trying to describe a "front-loaded algorithm" highlights the problem with the philosophical solution.

Historically, the argument for front-loading came from Laplacian determinism based on a Newtonian or mechanical universe--if one could control all the initial conditions, then the outcome was predetermined. First quantum mechanics, and then chaos-theory has basically destroyed it, since no amount of precision can control the outcome far in the future. (The exponential nature of the precision required to predetermine the outcome exceeds the information storage of the medium.)

But "front-loading" permitted Deists to say that God designed the Universe, and then stepped back and let "natural" forces operate, thereby removing any "supernatural" interference of the sort that Lucretius fumed about in 50BC. So if Newtonian determinism was now impossible, perhaps there could be some sort of algorithmic determinism (which I'll call Turing determinism) which could step in and permit a Deist to avoid the supernatural. That is, God doesn't have to create the oak from the acorn anymore, but the biological program He inserted in the acorn can handle all the intermediate steps. So perhaps, God didn't have to create humans, but the biological program in the first living cell He created, started the ecosystem that eventually evolved humans.

This remains, of course, the principle argument of theistic evolutionists, and was Howard Van Till's favored method before he stopped teaching at Calvin College and gave up on theism.

But this argument assumes that one can separate algorithms from the machinery that executes them, the information from the storage medium, the supernaturally contingent from the naturally necessary. The Newtonian revolution was to view the universe as a complicated machine where "natural" laws were the function of the machinery, and "supernatural" interference was information not incorporated into the gears. The fact that a watch tells time was "natural", whereas the setting to Eastern Standard Time was "supernatural" because it was contingent.

ID (Intelligent Design) makes the argument that the gears are just as supernatural as the time zone, because they are designed to function in a certain way. But such an argument doesn't escape the TE (Theistic Evolutionist) defense that the time zone setting is just as "natural" as the gears, because there were no laws of nature broken. This would all be semantics, if it were not for the corollary, that ID claims to probe the character of the designer by studying the design, whereas TE claims that front-loading is indistinguishable from chance, making the designer inscrutable. (Which keeps his faith transcendentally Kantian, and science a-theistically independent of God.)

But is it true that algorithmic front-loading can be naturalistic, independent of God, Turing-deterministic, and thus incapable of revealing anything about a living God?

I'd like to make the argument that Turing determinism is impossible for several reasons, and therefore front-loading is indistinguishable from the supernatural, from the actions of God intervening in history.

a) The Turing problem

Alan Turing himself addressed a number of algorithmic dilemmas with the thought experiment of the deterministic computer now called a Turing machine. He asked if the outcome of such a computer can always be predicted, and demonstrated several examples of completely unpredictable behavior. Applying this to our biological example, it says that some organisms may act/evolve unpredictably, though perhaps not the ones God programmed.

But Turing went beyond this existence proof, and demonstrated necessity--a computing machine with feedback, where the output tape went into the input, was always unpredictable. In our biological example, we have to define the input and the output. TE tells us that the input is an organism, and the output is more organisms, and the computer is the organism too. In other words, the type of algorithmic determinism required by TE is not weakly, but strongly recursive, and therefore doubly unpredictable.

Even should God have infinite knowledge of the outcome of such a biological algorithm, the information regarding its outcome cannot be contained within the system itself. Therefore if the system is determined, it must be determined externally, with constraints outside of biology, which is exactly the definition of the supernatural that the TE "front-loading" was intended to remove!

b) The Functionalism Dilemma

Let us pretend for the moment, that the feedback between the output and the input doesn't exist, that DNA is a code that is itself independent of the cell that houses it. This is similar to the argument that consciousness is just the program running on the computer of the brain with no ability to change the brain circuits. Also note the similarity to Darwinist evolution, where the evolving critter has no ability to modify his genes or plan his progeny (unlike, say, Larmarckian evolution). Why do we have to pretend there is no feedback when there is plenty of scientific evidence for it? Because otherwise the output becomes unpredictable, or more accurately, purposeful. That is to say, contingent indeterminate things allow for will, for consciousness, for decisions in a way that necessary determined things do not.

So ignoring the feedback, or better, disallowing the feedback, means that we must keep the software and the hardware distinct. But this is difficult for a cell, since the DNA software is a subset of the cellular hardware. In physics lingo, we might try to separate the contingent initial conditions from the determined physical laws. Or in computer science lingo, we might try to make a distinction between the arbitrary data and the fixed algorithmic code. The DNA is the contingent data, whereas the RNA and ribosomes are the fixed machinery for transcribing it.  Then TE Turing-determinism would consist of God creating this cellular duplication hardware aeons ago, and feeding it a long tape of DNA instructions that eventually result in us. Presto, theistic evolution with entirely natural development from a long-forgotten supernatural initial condition!

Now the problem with this scenario is not that the one-celled amoeba has little of the DNA that make up humans (the storage problem), nor even that many inter-dependent organisms are needed for humans to exist (the irreducible complexity problem), but that it is impossible to keep the data and code separate.

For example, many computer viruses operate on the principle of "buffer overflow" where a program expects data--say, a last name--and the hacker gives it a program instead which overflows the memory space allocated for it and ends up in the part of memory allocated for code. Voila, the hacker has taken over the program. In just such a way, the DNA encodes not just copies of itself, but for making changes to the copying machinery. Viruses multiply in biology as they do in computers, by hijacking the system machinery. The only safe system is one that is never networked, has no USB port, no floppy or DVD slot, and does only what the factory loaded into it. Since that would be a pretty useless system, I cautiously network my laptop, but spend countless CPU cycles on anti-virus programs, just as much of the cellular DNA machinery is dedicated to making sure it is not hijacked.

Which is to say, because there cannot be any clear separation of data and code, there must exist mechanisms for eliminating hackers. By definition, such systems span the interface between data and code, looking for "foreign" code and "bad" data. But who tells the machine what is "foreign" and what is "bad"? My anti-virus files get updated periodically, but who updates the DNA? How does the cellular immune response recognize itself? If it is not accomplished externally (supernaturally!), then we are acknowledging a process that "contaminates" the determinate code with the contingent data.

Now we begin to recognize the hatred Darwin felt toward Lamarck. For the slightest amount of contingent data (hacker) destroys all determined (legitimate) code. Determinacy is a fragile state, intolerant of any amount of contingency, whereas contingency is robust, absorbing large amounts of determinacy while still remaining contingent.

But the problem is bigger than the need for an immune system. There is information stored in the computer operation, in the motion of the cellular machinery. A computer with a robust immune system, impeccable data storage, and factory-fresh operating system can still hang, "blue-screen" or crash. The system is inoperable until it is "rebooted", which involves taking it back to a known state and starting forward again, and you may still have lost that document you were working on. Every level of hierarchy in a computer has information, from the code, to the data, to the state it was in just before it crashed. And if, God forbid, you were installing the latest operating system service pack from Microsoft when your colleague impatiently pulled the power cord out, you may never be able to recover the system without asking Microsoft to send the system disks and wiping the disk.

So not only is the code indistinguishable from the data in principle, but the operation of the computer, the dynamical state of the system is in principle indistinguishable from the code and the data. The only escape from viruses and incompetent colleagues is an external system fixer, which is precisely the "supernatural" interference that Turing-determinism was intended to avoid. It is even worse than this, for disallowing any external influence means that the code and data get progressively damaged, until they are inoperable; what John Sanford called "Genetic Entropy".  It would appear that without God, our race is doomed.

c) Intelligent Design

Having made the argument that Turing-determinism is not possible, have we fallen into the accursed "God-of-the-Gaps" pitfall which is so reviled by TE? Have we argued that Genetic Entropy will require God to continually tweak the genome to keep it on track? If so, then we have reduced God to a lowly grease-monkey, whose main job is running around defending ID from TE entropy? Surely this is too demeaning a job description for the Creator of the Universe!

Well actually, I think "God of the Gaps" is a very good way to describe God, if you take "gaps" to be fractal. Georg Cantor proposed the Cantor Set, constructed by taking a line and removing the middle third. Then take the two remaining lines and remove their middle thirds. Repeat this process ad infinitum, and what do you have left? Well, we can write a mathematical series of what we have taken from the interval (0,1) and sum the infinite series--e.g. 1/3 + 1/3 (2/3) + 1/3 (4/9) ... and when we are done the series = 1. That is, there is nothing left. Yet something remains, because the number 1/4 still is there! In fact, there are an infinite number of fractions still left in the interval. Cantor described this as a "perfect set that is nowhere dense". It is a set where everything is a gap, yet something remains. It is often used as an early example of a fractal, which I think of as mathematical foam, looking the same no matter how microscopically you examine it.

So once we define a "God of the Gaps" as a "God at every time and spatial scale," then I am quite comfortable with this solution. For if a "gap" represents something we don't know, then we are saying our knowledge is 0% of interval, while God's is 100%. Which is not to say that we have no knowledge, but rather that God's knowledge is infinite compared to ours. (Cantor would have said "trans-finite", and took a lot of grief for suggesting that some infinities are bigger than others, so that there are an infinite number of infinities.)

But we can take the idea of a fractal in another direction altogether. Something that is everywhere the same is homogeneous and boring, lacking information. Something everywhere the same with repetitive structure, say, a salt grain with a face-centered cubic crystal, has very little information.  But if it has a complex structure it contains abundant information, yet if the structure looks the same at every magnification, then not only does it have information, but the information is non-local. The only way that point A far from point B can look like the same structure, is if there is a global requirement imposed on it. Mathematically, a fractal is the solution to a non-local equation. In William Dembski's terminology, it is specified complex information, or CSI.

So paradoxically, when we find that microscopes with higher and higher magnification give us more of the same, we are witnessing something much bigger than our microscope. When whales and elephants and people and shrews and mites and rotifers and bacteria are all made out of cells, we are observing something bigger than the Earth. When stromatolites and trilobites and dinosaurs and mastodons and people are all made out of cells, we are observing something older than the Earth.

In contrast, TE argues that naturalist processes are purely local, indistinguishable from chance and law. But such processes can never produce fractals in either space or time, for like Democritus' atoms, they have no spatial or temporal memory, knowing only themselves and the violent blows of hitting others in their way. But the fractal properties of nature indicate that non-local or global processes are at work, which by definition are external to the individual ignorant participants. In other words, the naturalist understanding of fractal space-time requires a supernatural explanation.

Conclusion

"Front-loading" is the TE attempt to stretch a Newtonian concept of determinism into an algorithmic form to avoid the collapse of Laplacian determinism. We have tried to show that algorithmic or Turing-determinism is incapable of describing biological evolution, for at least three reasons: Turing's proof of the indeterminancy of feedback; the inability to keep data and code separate as required for Turing-determinancy; and the inexplicable existence of biological fractals within a Turing-determined system.

Life is full of challenges, no one can avoid them. It is just a question of which challenges one accepts. My car mechanic brother tells me this one should be avoided at all cost.

Ever since the '94 Suburban rolled on the Interstate, we've been needing a new vehicle that can (a) seat 8+; and (b) pull a trailer. So the wife and I went up to the auto auction that is held every Tuesday and Friday just over the line in Limestone county. It's an interesting location, with a mix of cars from wealthy Madison county and the much poorer environs. We've bought 2 cars there, and discovered that the average mileage is 150,000, and average price around $2000, unless its  Japanese in which case the mileage is closer to 250,000. They've been serviceable cars, though I've spent more than I bid for them, since evidently the buyer is obligated to buy what he bid, but the seller isn't obligated to sell for that.

But both of those cars came from the $300 deductible guarantee lot--if it requires more than $300 in repairs than it can be returned. Today the only vehicle that met our criteria was an old '92 Suburban in the "as is" lot. Now Suburbans hold their resale value much longer than most both because they are reliable and because there isn't much competition, even from the crop of modern SUV's. When's the last time you saw one with 9 kids packed into it? And this Suburban had only 160,000 miles. Low mileage for a 17 year old truck, I thought as I watched it being driven around the lot. The paint was peeling on the hood, the interior was dirty, the A/C didn't cool, and at that age, required the Montreal-protocol-banned Freon propellant, so it couldn't be recharged. "That's probably why it is in the as-is lot", I reasoned as I bid on it and got it for $850. "We'll clean, sand and paint the car, and maybe get some black-market Freon from Mexico" I said to my wife, as I pulled out of the lot and she followed behind me.

That's when I discovered the real reason for the "as is" lot, it had no third gear. The engine shifted up twice and then the power vanished as the tachometer raced wildly. I made an emergency stop at the auto store and bought transmission fluid, oil and radiator anti-freeze. The engine was hot, having been driven 50 miles to the auction in 2nd gear. But no joy, the transmission refused to find 3rd. I bought a Haynes manual.

When I got home I parked the vehicle where it could be jacked up, opened the manual, and read that automatic transmissions were beyond the ability of home repairmen. I went on the internet and discovered that rebuilt transmissions were going for $1100. Ouch. But a rebuild kit with new "steels"--the clutch bands--could be had for $130. This is where I e-mailed my brother, "which kit should I get?"

His advice was immediate. Drive it back to the auction and sell it as fast as possible.

Alas, some things can only be learned by experience. I ignored his advice, got my 16-yr old son off the couch, and jacked up the car. While Haynes may not have instructions on rebuilding transmissions, they did have instructions on removing them. (Installation, as they always say unhelpfully, is the reverse of removal. Would that life were that symmetrical!)  So we got out the wrenches and proceeded to drain the transmission fluid, take off the bolts, and got to the stage where we had to remove the driveshaft.

It wouldn't budge.

"Maybe we should jack the back wheels off the ground," I said while rereading the manual for the fifth time. Strangely, the screw jack in the Suburban was unused. Did they never have a flat tire in 17 years?  But as I soon discovered, this was because the jack was useless. Oh it operated properly and lifted the truck, but the leaf springs were so big, the tires never came off the ground.

"We'll put some boards under the jackstands and the jack," I told my son, "we'll get it off the ground." Three boards and four feet later the truck teetered precariously on the jack stands. Looking around, I found an old log that my son had rolled from a neighbor with the intention of using it as an anvil for making plate armor. "Let's put it under the truck," I said, "we don't want that coming down on us." One tire still had some friction with the ground, so we placed some more boards under the jack and just as the wheel cleared the ground, there was a groan and the entire truck slid sideways off the stands.

As my son scrambled clear, the log did its job. But the jack was bent and my wife's face had gone pale.

"Enough messing around for the day", I said, "time to put the tools away."

"Can we take it to a mechanic?" my wife asked with pleading eyes.

"We'd have to tow it" I answered.

My e-mailing brother was less sanguine. "I'll give you a Subaru that needs a new clutch fork. Why don't you work on that instead?"

Challenges may be accepted or rejected, but they come unanticipated, as heralds of a unknown future, of an unforeseen war. Yes, we can pick our battles, but we cannot pick our wars.

The Suburban said nothing, but its hulking frame remains a mute gauntlet in my driveway, waiting for me to make up my mind.

I had three conversations about miracles in the last 18 hours, and concluded that it still needed some clarification. So here is my fourth and final installment in what became a soap. (Installment 1 here, 2 here, and 3 here.)

What do miracles say?

To summarize the previous 3 posts, we can state succinctly what they don't say. They don't say that God carefully created the "laws of nature" and then whimsically "breaks" them just because He can. Not only is that some sort of dualism (laws being separate from God), but it also promotes a purposeless nominalism (God can do anything He wants for no reason at all.)

Nor do miracles say that the reporter of miracles is untrustworthy, a good storyteller, overly emotional or uneducated. Nor are miracles merely code for something else, a myth that is "true" in some other manner or universe. Nor are miracles rare, limited to certain time-periods, or restricted to gods, demi-gods and extremely holy prophets. That is, miracles are not valuable objects like diamonds, covetted because their existence is scarce, rather, miracles are more like presidential press conferences, valued for what they communicate.

Looking through the Bible, miracles do not occur for their own sake, but in order to serve another purpose. Moses' first three miracles before Pharaoh included turning his staff into a snake, making his skin leprous, and turning water into blood. These were intended to validate Moses as God's messenger and hence his message to Pharaoh that the Israelites should be freed. Pharaoh didn't deny the reality of the miracles, but tested them against his own magicians. When they reported that these were the genuine article, Pharaoh refused the message. The subsequent 10 plagues or "wonders" were then intended to convince the subjects of Pharaoh, the entire Egyptian nation, that Israel was God's people. In fact, the fear of God preceded Israel as it moved up into the Levant. The message of these most famous miracles was the fear of Israel's God.

The miracles of Elijah and Elishah the prophets are the next most famous ones in the Bible, which do not have this overarching message, but seem to be random, acts of personal desire. They call down fire from heaven at will, run faster than horses, multiply oil and flour to feed a family, raise the dead, or float an axe-head that was lost in the river. What is the message here? Each miracle had a story for which the miracle was the punchline.

The wicked queen Jezebel had introduced worship of the thunder-lightning god named Baal, and when Elijah called down fire from a hard blue sky, he was intentionally demonstrating the superiority of Israel's god to Baal. Or when he fed a family with a jug of oil and a jar of flour, it was a demonstration as much for Elijah as the widow, that God is sufficient widows and orphans even in the midst of famine. Or the axe-head that was borrowed and lost in the river, the miraculous recovery shows a concern for private property and personal responsibility.

But without the context, the miracle is of itself meaningless, reminding me of the late great radio host, Paul Harvey's "The Rest of the Story". I'll never forget the one that began, "At 7:05pm the boiler at a little country church exploded, destroying the sanctuary above. Choir practice began at 7:00pm. But no one was injured." In "the rest of the story" Paul Harvey related in his gravelly voice how everyone in the choir had an unusual reason for being late that night. And suddenly the small-town event became a big-town miracle.

So the first thing that miracles tell us, is that they are the punchline to a story, a very personal story that involves characters who appreciate it most. Those of us who watch from the outside may not feel the impact of the miracle, but like Job's friends or Jericho's citizens, may still feel the awe of the event. Despite the intense personalization of the miracle, its impact can be shared with those who are willing to identify with the actors.

And this is the second thing that miracles say, that participation is required. If we are to understand Paul Harvey's miracle, we have to say "That could have been me!" This is what took Pharaoh so long to grasp, though only temporarily. This is what took a tough, war-hardened sergeant in full gear to fall on his knees before an unarmed, gray-bearded Elijah. This is what the Pharisees never grasped when they schemed to kill the resurrector of Lazarus, but what the Philippian jailor immediately understood when an earthquake unhinged his jail.

That participation isn't always quick or easy. In fact, it sometimes is harsh and demanding. It often forces us out of our comfort zone. When Rahab looked out her tiny window above the massive wall and saw the plains dotted with the tents of the Israelites, she must have wondered if all those miracles in Egypt were possible in her fortress-town of Jericho. To acknowledge that "it could have been me", was to fear that foreign god Yahweh, to submit to the rule of an alien nation, to envision a future without the comforts of her land, her language, her friends. Participation is a commitment that doesn't come easily.

This then is the most important thing that miracles say, because they speak directly to us; they ask us for a decision, no, they demand one. Rahab chose by her action, but the remaining 30,000 inhabitants chose by their inaction. In both cases, they made a choice. Miracles, even miracles in far away Egypt, have a way of judging us.

The eye that is blind to the miracle of life; the heart that is cold to the miracle of love; the hand that is clenched from the miracle of alms; the mouth that is dumb to the miracle of thanks is not just impoverished, it is condemned. For miracles are the message that we are made for a purpose, a purpose not our own. Miracles demand from us submission to the one who really is in charge: "a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God."

Thermodynamics is not only the pinnacle of 19th century physics, but at the time and lingering into the present, carried a whiff of semi-religious overtones. The field arose with the birth of the Industrial Revolution, whose childhood was the Age of Steam. For the first time, steam engines made it possible for man to triumph over his environment without the mobs of slaves Pharaoh needed to erect his pyramids. It was preceded by several centuries of development of water power, with entire factories or mills, located near fast rivers so as to harness the energy of falling water to drive entire buildings full of leather belts. The only remnant today of this important precursor to the Industrial Revolution is the large number of "Mills" in place names. But steam permitted factories to be built anywhere that coal and water could be delivered, and thermodynamics was the Scottish science that fixed its profitability. Despite having a unit of power named for him, James Watts was not the inventor of the steam engine, but the Scot credited with making it 4 times more efficient.

With such success in improving the efficiency of the engine, fertile minds continued to imagine that equally great improvements in efficiency were waiting to be discovered and provide a steady income from patents. Perhaps it was possible to invent an engine that would run forever without any coal at all! But French engineer, Sadi Carnot, destroyed all these fantasies when he calculated the maximum possible efficiency of a theoretical carnot-cycle steam engine. It seems work is a form of energy, and energy is never free, it isn't even cheap. Rather, energy is conserved, neither increasing nor decreasing, but always changing form and degrading into that least usable of all forms: heat. The laws of thermodynamics describe this universal journey of energy from its birth as work to its long drawn-out heat death, where death is deanthropomorphized (physicalized?) as the mysterious "Entropy".

The mathematics wasn't limited to steam engines, however, and the physicist's wandering eye began to see everything as a disguised power plant: the sun, the hydrologic cycle, chemical reactions, the human body, and of course, the living cell. Soon physicists were claiming that there wasn't an object in the universe that didn't obey these laws. In Sir Arthur Eddington's pop-sci book, "The Nature of the Physical World" (1928) he writes:

If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations—then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation—well these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

And so thermodynamics, like Einstein's space-time, or Heisenberg's quantum mechanics, became part of the furniture of reality, the geometry of Plato's forms, the law of heaven second only to God himself.

There was just one problem. Living things seem to violate thermodynamics routinely.

Which is to say, they multiply and make complex things out of simple ones. They take carbon dioxide and water and sunshine and make redwood trees and oats from it. Then other living things make rabbits or houses or the Golden Gate bridge from them. Complexity is increasing, and work seems to increase, not decrease. How can living things seemingly violate these inviolate laws of entropy?

As I remarked earlier, physicists dismissed it with a wave of the hand. "Living things are not closed systems", they would say, "they consume fuel and emit carbon dioxide, which more than compensates the Entropy-god for the things they make."

But does it? If we draw a big circle around the Earth or around the solar system, is the entropy really increasing? It would seem that the anti-entropy (negentropy) or the information of the system is growing exponentially with life, and this doesn't seem to fit the three laws of thermodynamics. Have they really nothing to say at all about life?

In recent years, biologists have been getting more physical, and physicists getting more biological, so there has been a resurrection of interest in this philosophical topic. An early effort was to find a "fourth law" of thermodynamics that would explain what life is doing. It has blossomed to no less than 17 different attempts on this web site.

Here is Chris Beling's effort.

Here's my correspondence with Chris, on what I think is the meaning of these 4th law attempts.

The 4th Law has been claimed multiple times, Prigogine's MaxEnt being one of the earlier manifestations. (A recent popular book was "Into the Cool" here's a link to my PPT talk.) What is peculiar, is that it sounds like your formulation and Prigogine's are diametrically opposite. So perhaps you want to either: a) describe yours as a further refinement; or b) describe yours as a 5th law.

> I have looked through your powerpoint. I have some difficulty because I do not know the specifics of many of the systems you study i.e Coronal Heating. I think I would have to take each specific subject one by one - and would need more materials to read.

It isn't your fault for finding it hard to read. I usually annotate my PP slides, but not this one, and even I had trouble remembering what I was talking about three years ago! Coronal heating has been a mystery because the source of the energy is the sun's photosphere at 5500K, whereas the corona is 2,000,000K, which makes it appear that energy flows from colder to hotter, violating Newton's law of cooling, as well as numerous thermo laws.

> But there are some interesting things that come out: (1) That Gibbs Free Energy and Exergy are the same thing. I have read one or two books where Exergy was mentioned and to me it seemed the same as Gibbs Free Energy, but then I thought - why give it a different name?

Well, you must remember that Gibbs was a somewhat obscure AMERICAN physicist, and "exergy" is promoted by Europeans. Also recall that Italian Amedeo Avogadro didn't discover any numbers, but rather German Johann Josef Loschmidt, so that when the British Alfred Nobel prize went to Frenchman Jean Perrin in 1909, he would not acknowledge the prior work of a German, and attributed it to the Italian. I hope that clarifies things.

> (2) MEPP. The first thing of interest is that this is the same thing as "The minimum entropy production rule". I had been confused about the naming (as you may see from my paper). I badly need to read on this subject and I think the reference you give should help me.

MEPP actually stands for "Maximum Entropy Production Principle", though Prigogine gave it the minimum entropy title, thus confusing you. Prigogine's Nobel prize in Chemistry in 1977 has been supplanted by more modern work that prefers to talk of the maximum entropy production, though they are still talking about the same thing. The question addressed, is when a system is far from equilibrium, which process restoring equilibrium will dominate? The answer is the one that increases entropy the fastest. So large convection cells will be favored over small ones in a boiling pot, simply because they increase entropy faster than little convection cells.

> Question: Is the MEPP what you would refer to as the 4th law?

Yes, this is the MEPP that I refer to as the 4th law.

> (3) Telos: According to the law of "information decrease" = entropy increase - a law that only works if there is some sort of configuration space (real of imposed) then it is indeed true that the fireball of the BB must be low entropy. This certainly points towards an origination of information (and thus intelligence).

I'm not sure I understand your statement. The BB fireball was incredibly dense as well as incredibly hot. If S=Q/T, then Q (heat) goes as the density, T (temperature) is inversely proportional to density (PV/nR = T), so S was very high in the BB. So it is counter-intuitive that a high entropy BB could produce a low-entropy universe that included us.

> Comment: I don't see in your work mention of information. I think the definition of information is critical for the 5th law (if we call it this).

I'm not entirely sure what happened to the slide on Shannon information. Perhaps I merely said the words when I gave the talk. But in any case, Shannon information is the negative of the log of S ==> -ln(S) = I or "negentropy".

> (4) Do you know of any other good accessible book on MEPP and NET?

My introduction to the topic was "Into the Cool" which I think I referenced at the end of the talk. The original talk I heard was by a remote sensing specialist who demonstrated that the temperature of a field of peas or grassland was an indication of the health of the ecosystem because living things attempt to maximize their exergy. Then the figures in my talk were extracted from lengthy Google searches on the topic, several PP were found. There were also several good Wikipedia entries.

The connection between "telos" and information, is that life uses MEPP to maximize exergy, thereby avoiding heat death. As long as there is a flow of energy, then it is possible to stay far from equilibrium making use of structure to produce MEPP. That structure while not always spontaneous (like Benard convection cells) nevertheless demonstrates order and information. Thus information arises out of heat flow as a 2nd order process (relying on derivatives of the basic quantities), whereas everything in the 1st order (direction of heat flow, equilibrium thermo) removes information. To paraphrase, everything in the first 3 laws destroys information, whereas the 4th law restores information. For the sake of symmetry, perhaps we should have the 5th and 6th laws restoring information as well. I would guess, though haven't done anything in the field for 3 years, that the complexity of 2nd order, non-equilibrium thermo will parallel the transition from electrostatics to plasma physics.

You should download Prigogine's 1977 Nobel lecture. I don't know whether I referenced it or not in my talk. Prigogine was criticized for getting too philosophical (as in Bergsonian) and abandoning physics (a crime Feynman once said was endemic among middle-aged physicists, and I might add, especially those who have become famous). You might think of him as the intellectual grandfather of the Sante Fe Institute and Stuart Kauffman's attempts to find self-organized, emergent phenomena. That is, the everlasting Darwinian hope of life crawling out of the slime. The recent Vatican conference on evolution had a bunch of these guys lecturing the Church on why they don't need no stinking teleology.

The following critical review of Prigogine suggests that his mathematical insights were singularly unfruitful (but then again, that's exactly what you would expect a critic to say), though it is peculiar that the critic doesn't mention Kauffman at all.

Here at seminary, I've finally understood the connection between Whitehead, Bergson, Barth, Milic Capek, scads of modern theologians, Stuart Kauffman, and good 'ole GWF Hegel. There really are only a half dozen metaphysical constructs possible: the One, the Many, the Dual, the Trinity, and various Dialectic dynamical equilibria (think of them as the NET of metaphysics).

I think it was George Gamow who published a book "One, Two, Three, Infinity" about physics, but it could easily have been about philosophy. So also Prigogine and Hegel want to put information into the dynamical regime, which removes it from the static eternity of Augustine. This Hegelian desire attempts to solve the dualist paradoxes introduced by various solutions to the pre-Socratic one vs many problem. However, as my seminary prof attempted to demonstrate, Hegel and his 20th century progeny really can't solve the problem either, rather they just use a sophisticated shell game that keeps moving the problem around. This is Dembski's critique of Darwinism, that it plays a shell game with information. In the end, both Darwinism and Hegel put all the information into the boundary conditions, whose eternality is implied but rarely stated. My prof is trying to convince me that a founding faculty at WTS, Cornelius Van Til, solved the problem with a Trinitarian metaphysic that has been extended by WTS faculty John Frame and Vern Poythress. I've sort of come to the same view in a wide circle that includes some math and physics examples. Here's a paper I wrote last winter for a course I had hoped would get credit, that calls it the "holy grail" of post-modernism.

The point of the paper, is that information is part of the process that it describes, and therefore cannot be separated from it. Such circular loops are particularly pernicious when they deal with definitions. God, people and words are all things whose definition is inclusive of the class, and therefore can be said to be sui generis. Information, then, can only be metaphysically defined in a system that includes one of those three basic categories. E.g, God as information, man as information, or words as information. Otherwise, it becomes an idol, a substitute G/M/W whose definition decimates itself, whose existence denies itself, whose operation eats itself.